


Apple Tree Metaphor

by rulebreakingmoth



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Breaking Up & Making Up, Daddy Issues, Homophobic Language, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, dirty talk but it isn't good, slightly subtler mommy issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:20:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28891257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rulebreakingmoth/pseuds/rulebreakingmoth
Summary: So the Tom thing doesn’t make him feel guilty or anxious in the ways that it probably should. But sometimes he thinks about what would happen if he told his mom, and that’s the stuff that really freaks him out. Because he knows what she would say, and it would hurt worse than anything else."Just like your father," she'd say, and she'd be right.
Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans
Comments: 33
Kudos: 69





	Apple Tree Metaphor

**Author's Note:**

> swear to god this was supposed to be like...5000 words. ruh-roh raggy. i obviously wanted to have this done before christmas, but the christmas element is so minor that i'm not sure it matters! enjoy this mostly secular winter-ish fic.
> 
> i don't know anything about business. this is merely thousands of words of horniness, bad communication and daddy issues. don't expect any of the "business" referred to in this fic to mean anything at all.
> 
> (warnings: use of the f-slur, alcohol/marijuana use, lots of internalized homophobia from basically everyone. please let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to tag/warn for!)

The thing about the whole Tom thing is that Greg doesn’t feel, like, super bad about it? He knows that he should, rationally, that it’s a bad thing, but in the way that you can know smoking is a bad thing and still crave the burn in your throat, the ash on your fingertips, the brief high and the comedown. Knowing is different than feeling, you know?

Tom says it’s all kosher under the rules of The Agreement, capital A, the verbal contract between he and Shiv that, as far as Greg can tell, has no actual agreements in it. The first time Greg had really questioned him about it, a tentative, “Um, just checking, but like...what about Shiv?”, Tom had waved it off.

“We’re both adults,” Tom had said, wriggling his hand under Greg’s waistband, and Greg had taken it for the Shiv-ism that it clearly was. He doesn’t think that Shiv ever imagined Tom would exercise his rights as an adult by fucking her estranged cousin silly, but in Tom’s defense, she was the one who didn’t want that adultery clause. 

Shiv doesn’t even love Tom, and maybe that’s part of it. Not that he...whatever, it doesn’t matter really, because that’s not what this is about. But he’s not really scared of her finding out about them, because at worst, she’d be pissed for, like, a second and then probably forget about it. 

At best, she’d give them some kind of detached blessing, but even Greg knows when a pipe dream is a pipe dream.

So the Tom thing doesn’t make him feel guilty or anxious in the ways that it probably should. But sometimes he thinks about what would happen if he told his mom, and that’s the stuff that really freaks him out. Because he knows what she would say, and it would hurt worse than anything else. Worse than Shiv exacting her revenge or Tom getting bored and leaving him, worse than being disowned by the Roys and having everything he’s built in New York taken away.

“Just like your father,” his mom would say, and she’d be right.

\---

Greg remembers being five, maybe six at the oldest, and thinking his dad was the best dad there was. Not because of anything extraordinary, but just because he was the only dad Greg had ever had, and that’s really all it takes for a kid. 

It’s not like Greg had had any sort of reference point for what a dad was like, or supposed to be like. He knew that his dad was funny, and definitely not as scary or serious as Grandpa Ewan, but he still seemed like a grown-up in a way that seemed...safe. He wore glasses a lot of the time, little thin ones like Gepetto. He made him snacks, and would make sure Greg got to and from school when Mom was having one of her stay-in-bed days, and called him “champ,” which was special because nobody else ever called him anything but Greg.

He has memories of his dad, but most of them are like this. Just...things. Little details that don’t really make up a real person. But there’s this one concrete memory that sticks with him the most, or maybe it’s more like a few memories sort of mashed into one, and it goes like this:

His dad is going to take him to the park. His mom must be having one of her stay-in-bed days because they were all supposed to go to the movies together, but that morning she doesn’t even come out of her room for breakfast. Greg’s dad feeds him a cherry poptart, which is cool because he’s only supposed to have sugary breakfasts on special occasions, but it’s also not cool because cherry tastes like medicine, and he thought he made it pretty clear last time that he likes strawberry.

When they get there, Greg makes a beeline for the swings while his dad falls behind to mingle with the other parents. He’s already tall for his age, but he doesn’t mind because it means he’s the best at going high. Some of the older kids like to get up way high and then jump off, but Greg thinks this is stupid because then you lose your turn on the swing.

Greg’s dad usually stands with the other dads, especially Mr. Kirkland, who’s Austin’s dad. The Kirklands live around the corner from them, and Greg doesn’t really like Austin very much -- he has a lot of Pogs, which Greg doesn’t care about -- but they have playdates all the time just so their dads can hang out and talk.

But today Mr. Kirkland isn’t here, even though Greg can see Austin sitting criss-cross applesauce underneath the slide and messing around in the wood chips. He’s pretty caught up in the swing for a while, pumping his gangly little legs until he’s positive that his swing is level with the top of the swing set, but when he tries to get his dad’s attention to show him, he’s too busy talking to Austin’s mom.

Austin’s mom reminds him of a mom from a commercial or something. She has blonde hair and always wears sweaters. She probably never spends the whole day in bed, just spends her time vacuuming or whatever. But she doesn’t look like a commercial mom right now. She looks mad.

They’re too far away to hear, but he can tell that she’s yelling, and Greg’s dad clearly isn’t yelling back. His stomach clenches as he wonders if they’re talking about him, if maybe Austin told his mom about that song Greg taught him. My eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school…

But Greg’s dad never says anything to him, not even on the car ride home. They even stop at Burger King on the way, so Greg is almost one hundred percent sure that Mrs. Kirkland wasn’t mad about him.

When they get home, Greg’s mom is out of her room and sitting on the couch. She asks if she can speak to Greg’s dad alone. He shrugs and runs off to his room, and a few hours later they all eat dinner together, and Greg tells his mom about how he went so high on the swings he almost went all the way around. 

And that’s it, really. It’s a nothing story that means nothing, except if you have the hindsight to understand that it means a lot, actually. Hindsight that Greg, the Greg of today, does have and doesn’t really want. Because while other people just have days that their dad took them to the park, Greg has this day, the day that felt like any other day but was actually a marker in time. A great signifier of before and after, and the very last time that anybody took Greg to the park.

\---

The first time Tom touches him in a way that is strictly non-platonic, Greg isn’t even sure that that’s what it is at first. There have been so many touches -- Tom sweeping his palms over Greg’s shoulders, fiddling with his tie -- that seemingly meant nothing at all, regardless of how they made Greg feel at the time. Which was usually, like, confused and unsettled, and horny in a way that was extra confusing and unsettling. That’s probably exactly how Tom wants him to feel: wined and dined, and then pushed into the snow, protected and taken care of, then pushed away again and pelted with water bottles, and always, always crawling back for more.

It’s fucked, for sure. He gets that. 

But he also gets the sense that he maybe sort of understands Tom better than most people, now that he’s pushed through the perplexing fog of back-and-forth, love-and-hate. He thinks about Tom saying, “I don’t always like who I am, Greg,” and wonders if he had ever said that to anyone else before. He doesn’t wonder if it’s true, because even if Tom hadn’t sounded totally sincere, it makes sense. He’d probably lash out too if he felt that way about himself.

But does Shiv know that? That Tom doesn’t even like who he is, at his core? It seems like the kind of thing a Roy would dismiss on sight. Yeah, nobody likes themselves, what is this, the Brady Bunch? 

It’s fitting that the day everything changes, it’s on a yacht out in the middle of international waters. It’s sort of lawless in a way, and there’s plausible deniability - cabin fever made them do it, blah blah blah. It’s bullshit, but he likes having it there too. Just in case.

Greg’s been keeping a safe distance ever since Tom and Shiv came back from their little boat excursion, because he has a feeling it didn’t exactly put Tom in one of his better moods. He watches, frozen in fear and morbid curiosity, as Tom accosts Logan’s chicken wing, and thinks that maybe he’ll steer clear for the rest of the night.

But it’s Tom who comes to him, a knock at his cabin door followed by a verbal, “Knock knock, cock monkey,” that has Greg nervously cracking the door open to let Tom slip inside.

“Hey, man, what’s…” He trails off as Tom pushes past him, a jittery sort of mania playing in his eyes. 

“I did it, Greg,” Tom says triumphantly, directing himself right to the minibar. He doesn’t drink anything, just mindlessly rearranges the little bottles, runs his hands over them. Greg tries not to stare at his knuckles. “I finally did it.”

“Oh, wow, dude, that’s amazing,” Greg says, like he knows at all what he’s talking about. “Did what, exactly?”

Tom looks at him like he’s stupid, which is to say, Tom looks at him like he usually does. “Told Shiv how I felt.”

Greg is...so lost. He told Shiv he loved her? Wouldn’t she have already known, what with the whole wedding thing? Tom must recognize his confusion, so he takes a deep breath, and some of his enthusiasm deflates on the exhale. “I told her...that I...wasn’t happy. That I’m not. Happy.”

Ohh. That.

He’s not, like, shocked to hear that Tom’s unhappy. Anybody with eyes could tell that Tom is like a little puppy begging for Shiv’s scraps, and Greg has the added benefit of actually knowing the guy pretty well comparatively. But he’s a little shocked that Tom himself can tell he’s unhappy. That he even has access to that sort of self-awareness.

Tom crosses his arms impatiently, leaning back against the counter. “Well, come on, Greg, don’t say nothing. You can use that fucking enormous trout mouth for something useful, you know.”

Greg tries not to think about the many uses his “enormous trout mouth” has, and asks instead, “What did she say?”

“Oh, you know.” Tom does uncap one of the liquor bottles then, something amber-colored. “Nothing.” He takes a swig. Greg wonders off-handedly if they’ll charge him for it. No, surely not. This isn’t a hotel. Right? Yeah. Right.

(He makes a mental note to ask Tom later when they’re not, you know, focused on other things.)

“That’s not fair,” Tom amends, hissing through the burn of the alcohol. “She said she loved me.” Oh. “But I guess that was before I told her how I felt, so. Nothing, really.”

“Hmm.” Greg inches closer, his hands fidgeting just for something to do. Something that isn’t reaching out to Tom -- he seems too volatile for that still.

“God,” Tom says. “And to fucking...throw me under the bus? ‘Tom makes sense,’ what the fuck was that?”

“Yeah, that was not...super cool.” Cringeworthy, really. To watch Tom’s own wife argue the merits of his imprisonment...it makes him feel ashamed for Tom and just kinda bummed in general.

“Well, come on,” Tom says, impatient. He turns to pour himself an actual glass. “Say it.”

Greg opens his mouth but has no idea what he’s supposed to say.

“Come on,” Tom urges, “Say ‘I told you so.’”

“Um...did I?”

Tom scoffs and whips back around to face him, his mouth hanging open. “The wedding, Greg? What you told me? Before my wedding?”

Greg nods. “Ohhh, yeah--”

Tom knocks on Greg’s forehead with a closed fist, baring his teeth in a scary sort of laugh. “Hellooo, Gregory, anybody home?”

Greg chuckles, “Uh huh, yeah, but I just…” Tom’s knuckles are still resting at his hairline. He leans back just out of the way. “You know, just because I said Shiv was cheat--” Tom glares, so he stops that train.

“I just,” he starts. “I’m not like, happy that this happened, Tom. I’m not like, ‘Oh-ho, I was right!’” 

He watches in real time as Tom softens, his eyes casting downward and going glassy. Greg reaches out then to curl his fingers around Tom’s shoulder. Like a friend. “I’m sorry, you know? That you’re not happy.”

“Thanks, Greg,” Tom whispers, the words barely audible, even with how close they’re standing. Their eyes meet, Tom peering up underneath a furrowed brow, and Greg can’t help but massage lightly at the muscles of his upper arm. 

“Do you want, like...a hug?” He winces, already prepared for the blow that hasn’t come.

“Fuck off, Greg,” Tom says, and then flings his arms around him anyway.

Startled, Greg’s arms come around him a second or two later, stacked on top of each other with his fingers curling around each of Tom’s shoulders. Tom all but faceplants into his neck, and all Greg can think is how small Tom feels, smaller than he actually is. Greg usually thinks of them as equals, or of Tom as a giant, looming over him, but he never thinks of Tom like this. Someone shrunken down and just, like...looking for comfort.

Someone that Greg could envelope fully in his arms, like he is right now.

Tom makes an appreciative little sigh, and Greg chuckles. “Nice, right?”

Tom snorts. “Yeah, Greg, you’re a fucking pro. You should give lessons.” He doesn’t move though. He just keeps his arms loosely draped around Greg’s torso and his face pressed against Greg’s neck. He huffs out a breath, and Greg squirms. 

“Tickles,” he explains. 

Tom doesn’t call him a pussy or shove him away for complaining. No, if anything, he seems to nuzzle in closer, his lips parted on an exhale. And that doesn’t really tickle, no, it’s more...

Well. Aha.

There’s a different feeling in the air, suddenly, maybe because this is the longest they’ve ever been so quiet together, but probably because actually Tom’s warm, parted lips are pressing softly but deliberately at Greg’s neck, and then dragging slowly across the skin to come back together.

“Tom...” he whispers, but he doesn’t move either, afraid of what might happen if he does. 

And there’s Tom’s lips again, a little higher, closer to his jaw where he’s really sensitive, absolutely-one-hundred-percent-definitely kissing him. Kissing his neck, at least. Greg can’t help but shudder as that warm, sweet feeling spreads out from the skin of his neck down to his stomach, and then lower to his traitorous, very interested dick, and that shudder seems to be enough for Tom to pull back and meet his gaze again.

“Don’t ruin this,” he says, maybe more to himself than to Greg, and he kisses him.

It’s very wet, and there are a lot of teeth, and by any metric it shouldn’t be good, but it is. It’s hot and confusing, and Tom’s tongue is surprisingly hesitant where it glides across Greg’s. Like he isn’t just, you know, taking, but like maybe he wants Greg to kiss him back.

“Mmm-mph, Tom--” He pulls away, so very reluctantly, panting already. “What’re you doing?”

“Can’t you tell? I’m conducting an experiment, I wanted to know what your teeth tasted like,” he snarks. “What does it fucking look like I’m--” and then he’s kissing him again before he can finish his own sentence.

It’s so quick from there, almost too easy to clip the top few buttons of Tom’s shirt so he can slide one of his palms inside, just resting on the warm skin, thumb toying with Tom’s chest hairs. Tom is less cautious, rucking up Greg’s shirt so one hand can clutch at his back and the other can slip just fingertips underneath Greg’s waistband.

Oh, fuck. Tom is probably gonna touch his dick. And god, he’s really gonna like it.

Tom slips away to press wet, open kisses to Greg’s neck, stretching up on tip-toe to lave at his Adam’s apple, sliding down further to push away his shirt collar and mouth at his clavicle. Greg swallows, feeling hot and tight -- not just in his pants, but all over. (But, like, especially his pants.) 

He has to make sure, though, because this is getting to point-of-no-return territory, so he asks, “A-are you, like, you’re sure about this?”

Tom chuckles but doesn’t move his hands or stop kissing him. “Don’t stop me now, Greg, I’m on a roll.” 

“Right,” he says. “Like, on a roll...a roll of, uh, what? Exactly?”

Tom stares at him, perfectly still for a moment. “Of doing what I want,” he says, then takes Greg by the chin and learns what his teeth taste like.

Later, after they wipe themselves off with microfiber towels that probably cost more than Greg’s TV, they lay together in the expensive, silky sheets. Tom has his ear pressed to Greg’s chest, and he’s paranoid that Tom will be able to hear how quick his heart is going right now. He remembers reading something about how deep breathing or like, meditation can slow your heart rate, so he tries it.

“Stop fucking wheezing,” Tom says.

He pushes his fingers into Tom’s hair, and Tom lets him. He wonders what else Tom would let him do now. Would he let him kiss him, now that the haze of lust has dissipated? Could he follow his fingers with his mouth and nuzzle into the crown of his head, breathing in shampoo and sweat and, like, fancy cologne? Could he hold his hand?

He doesn’t do any of it. Tom would probably call him a girl or shove him out of bed for that, never mind that their dicks were rubbing up against each other, like, three minutes ago.

“Oh, Gregory,” Tom sighs in that deep, fake-sorta-ostentatious voice of his, “what have you gotten yourself into?” He laughs, belly-deep.

Greg joins in, “I dunno!” and feels kinda like he’s maybe losing it? Here he is, laughing half-naked with his cousin’s husband--

“Exchanging handies with your boss?” Oh yeah, that too. “Even better,” Tom exclaims, like it’s really, truly hysterical, which maybe it is, “your cousin’s husband--”

“I know! That’s what I was just...thinking…” He trails off as Tom goes quiet. The joke has run out of steam, it seems. 

Tom groans, scrubs a hand over his face. “Jesus.” He pushes himself up to a seated position, and Greg pulls his hand back, flexing the fingers that were just stroking through Tom’s saltwater-sprayed hair. Pretending to be casual, like he doesn’t already miss the feeling.

He thinks this is the moment that Tom gets up and leaves, throws Greg’s clothes at his face and threatens to kill him if he tells anybody, but it’s not. Tom sits, his back to Greg, and reaches out just two fingers to rest on Greg’s outstretched leg. 

“So you guys are...what, like, you’re probably gonna get divorced. Or…?” 

Tom exhales a long, drawn out, “I don’t know.” He rubs some of Greg’s leg hairs between his fingers. It feels weird, but not bad. “I don’t know what Shiv wants.”

“Right.” Greg pauses, cocks his head. Apparently the difference between Tom doing what he wants and what Shiv wants is approximately twenty minutes and two orgasms. “But didn’t you just say--”

“Oh, come on, Greg,” he says, brushing him off, “I just said that to get into your pants.”

“Yeah.” He pulls his leg up into his chest, away from Tom’s questing fingers. “That makes sense.”

Tom has the audacity to look hurt. “Greg, buddy…” He scoffs, hands gesticulating wildly, but Greg can tell he’s floundering for something fake to say. It’s bohemian or Haven’t you ever heard of a brojob?

But then Tom’s face softens, and he shrugs wordlessly. Greg tries to school his face into something more passive, but it’s basically impossible when Tom is crawling up the length of the bed, his eyes almost gray as they bore into Greg’s, his lips parted just slightly. He places his hand at the side of Greg’s neck. His thumb skims Greg’s jawline. 

He shrugs. His lips are turned upwards, but it’s not a smile. “Doesn’t matter what I want,” he says, and then he puts his shirt on and leaves.

\---

Greg thinks that’s it. A weird, terrible, sexy, confounding one-time thing that Tom won’t ever want to talk about again. And he’s fine with it, it’s whatever. He was pretty sure before that it wouldn’t even happen at all, so the fact that it did...it kinda feels like enough. If given the choice between what happened on the yacht and having that fantasy about sitting on Tom’s dick in his office chair, well...he’s not uninterested in the office thing, but the first one actually happened. 

When Tom comes to him again less than a week later, he’s wearing thick sunglasses and a hat, like he doesn’t want to get caught visiting traitor Greg’s apartment which, yeah, fair, and he says--

“Shiv and I are staying married.”

“Dude,” Greg groans. “Come on, seriously--”

“Don’t start with me, Judas!” Tom storms past him, welcoming himself inside like he did on the yacht, although Greg has a feeling this is going to end very differently. Greg clicks the door shut quietly. “You put me in this position.”

“I…” Did he? “Tom, it’s the morning--”

Tom flings his sunglasses off and jabs one finger in Greg’s direction. He reminds Greg of one of those Real Housewives. “You fucking lied to me.”

Greg winces. That’s actually a little fair. He did lie to him. But he doesn’t feel bad about it. He begins calm, measured. “So, I understand that you’re probably upset with me--”

“Oh, save it, you limp-dicked Lurch,” Tom sneers. “I should’ve known you’d be eager to squeal. You only went behind my back on this twice--”

“Hey, you put me in kind of a not great position, too, dude,” Greg points out. “You asked me to cover up evidence of, like...moral depravity -- twice,” he repeats.

“Because I thought I could trust you not to throw me to the goddamn wolves!”

“They were gonna throw you to the wolves, Tom! Don’t you remember? Fuckin’ Tom sundae with Greg sprinkles?” Tom locks up, arms folding tight across his chest and his eyes flicked up towards the ceiling. “I thought. I dunno.”

He thought it would help, maybe. To have Uncle Logan on the chopping block, take the heat off everyone else, save both their skins...but maybe that was naive. To think anything would be easier as a result of this.

He glances around, in case anyone’s listening. Once it would’ve been an irrational sort of paranoia, but he’s public enemy number two of Waystar Royco now. Someone may very well be listening. “Well, what about...the thing that...happened. On the yacht.” 

“Oh, what, Greg, did you think you were such an incredible lay that I was going to renege on my vows for you?”

“No, Tom, I just-- I thought you were unhappy! You said you were unhappy.”

“It’s embarrassing,” he practically hisses. “How fucking pathetic. Married and divorced? In the same year?” He laughs, humorless and cruel. 

“That’s not…” He trails off. 

Tom exhales, and he seems to shrink with it. “Shiv can protect me.” 

“I can…” Greg starts, but doesn’t finish because as much as he wishes it was true, it’s not. Kendall could feasibly protect Tom, but would he? He’d have no reason to. Greg’s pretty sure that Because I touched his dick and probably love him won’t seem like a compelling enough argument.

“Okay, well,” he says, trying for casual. “Thanks for stopping by, and uh, letting me know, and I guess I’ll see you…

“Greg, I didn’t—”

“...in court, maybe?”

“That’s not.” Tom huffs, then puts his hands on his hips. Looks at Greg, then looks away. “I didn’t come here just to say that.”

So Greg just waits in silence, and Tom rolls his eyes. He clearly had a plan for how this conversation was going to go, but Greg just doesn’t know what his lines are. “I was going to say that even though Shiv and I are staying married, I don’t…” He can’t look Greg straight in the eye, until all of a sudden he does. “I don’t want to stop. With you.”

Greg feels like someone just stuck a boxcutter in his back. He read this true story yesterday about a girl who got stabbed in the back, like, eight times with a boxcutter while she was jogging -- the girl described it as feeling like she was just being punched, really hard, between her shoulder blades. She didn’t even realize she was being stabbed right away. He’s been thinking about that a lot ever since, just like...the shock and the pain of thinking you’ve only been hit in the back until you realize there’s blood pooling around your feet? It’s like, holy shit. 

Anyway. He almost feels as surprised as that. No disrespect to that girl who got stabbed, that was definitely worse.

“You mean like,” he says, needing to get this straight, “when we had…”

“Yes, I mean--”

“...I think it’s technically called outercourse, what we did--”

“That’s enough,” Tom cuts him off. “But yes. That.”

He waits for the inevitable shoe to drop, for Tom to shove at him and laugh, “Greg, you should’ve seen your fucking face.” When it doesn’t come, he takes a tentative step forward.

“What, really? This isn’t...you’re not gonna use this to get like, tabloid pictures of my dick or something?”

“What would I even do with pictures of your dick? Is there something wrong with your dick?”

“No!”

“Exactly, so who the fuck cares about it?”

Greg nods. “So it’s not that. This is real?”

Tom is staring at his lips. “I’ve been thinking a lot about our little...tête-à-tête,” he says, not quite answering the question. “I think we should do it again.”

Tom fidgets, and Greg can’t help the smirk that creeps onto his lips. For the first time since, well, since he blackmailed Tom, he kind of has the upper hand. It makes him feel kinda jittery, in a good way, and bold enough to back Tom up until he is leaned faux-casually against the wall, Greg standing close enough that he actually has to crane his neck up to look at him.

He watches Tom swallow, hard.

“So…” He leans in and makes a show of glancing down at Tom’s lips. “...What are you doing today?” he asks, and he’s glad that Tom takes it for the invitation that it is to grab Greg by the hair and stick his tongue down his throat.

He’s happy then to let Tom take the lead, his hands warm and strong and teasing Greg to hardness in his sleep pants, only to take it right back when he decides to drop to his knees and inelegantly pulls Tom’s cock out of his trousers.

“Oh, Jesus Christ—” He swallows Tom down as far as he can, which is almost the whole way, he’s pretty pleased to say. Tom doesn’t seem to have any complaints, by the way he’s gasping and pulling at strands of Greg’s hair like weeds.

He pulls back until he’s just suckling at the head. He thinks about eating ortolans underneath a cloth napkin and chuckles, though he’s not quite sure what the relevance is to this situation.

“Motherf--” Tom mutters above him, and he calls him, “You fucking homewrecker, you--” and Greg is ashamed of the way it makes him plaster himself to Tom’s leg and come, like, twenty seconds later.

\---

As a kid, Greg feels kinda pissed that nobody ever prepared him for what was going to happen. He was taught about death, and sort of abstractly, the concept of divorce, but nobody ever sat him down and told him that there was a possibility that his dad might cheat on his mom with the neighbor’s dad, and then move away. Like, isn’t that the kinda stuff you’re supposed to cover with a kid?

People talk about it, is the thing. Like he overhears other moms at school sometimes, and his own mom doesn’t really try to hide it from him. She talks on the phone all the time with her friends and says stuff like, about how she’s gonna sue his dad, about how much she hates him now. She says things he doesn’t totally understand, but will someday, things like:

“He’s not gay, he’s desperate. Men get bored of their horrible wives who do everything for them, so they seek each other out for playtime. It’s pathetic.”

And things he does understand, or thinks he does, like:

“He’ll be back. He has a child, for god’s sake, he’s not running away to fucking San Francisco like some cliche.”

So there’s some confusion really, in that apparently his dad is gonna come back, but everyone is still talking about him like he’s not? His Grandpa Ewan comes to visit after two weeks and says, to his face, “Your father was a bastard. If there’s any justice in this world, he’ll suffer for it.”

So yeah, it sucks. 

It sucks for like, a thousand different reasons, the least of which is that he and Austin still have to go to school together. Austin’s parents aren’t getting a divorce, though, and that seems to have given him a better placement on the second grade totem pole. 

It’s Greg who takes the brunt of the teasing from the other kids and the weird, sad looks from teachers. On Father’s Day, when all the other kids get to do presentations on their dads, Miss Fisher titters over him and this kid Trey, whose dad literally left to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back, and asks them to do their own projects on a “man that they respect-slash-love.”

Greg wants to throw a fit, jump up and down and scream, “We are not the same! My dad is coming back!” But he doesn’t actually want to make a scene or get in trouble, so he does a project on his Uncle Logan, who’s a very rich and powerful guy in the...news business.

The other kids accuse him of making stuff up, and Miss Fisher yells at them to respect Greg’s presentation time. But she also smiles her sad, weird smile, and Greg knows she doesn’t believe him either.

His dad calls on Friday like he’s supposed to, but Greg tells his mom that he doesn’t want to talk. The next week he doesn’t want to either. And two times is enough, apparently, to keep his dad from really calling again.

\---

The thing with Tom continues on for the next few months with relatively little fanfare. Sure, Tom is a bitch some of the time, and his attitude during sex fluctuates wildly between what Greg is calling Aggressive Tom and Needy Tom, but that’s also part of what makes it so good. Tom is always really in it when they’re fucking -- Greg never worries that Tom is somewhere else in his head. Not thinking about Shiv or anyone else.

And he’s not like...just taking what he wants. He’s basically what some people would call a “generous lover,” people who aren’t Greg, because lover is the kind of word that makes him feel kinda slimy? 

But yeah, Tom is like...good to have sex with. He’s attentive, enthusiastic, and freakishly obsessed with giving Greg more orgasms that he actually needs to have. To the point where Greg has to put his foot down sometimes.

(“Dude, are you mad at me?” he asks one night when Tom reaches for his dick for the fourth time, both of them laying on top of the sheets in the dark. “Seriously, is this a punishment?”

“What?” Tom sounds genuinely upset that he would even think that.

“You’re just kinda going a little overboard, maybe?” He gestures to his reddened dick. “Like I’m feeling sort of overworked?”

Tom’s eyebrows raise, his mouth dropping into an intrigued little gasp. “Oh, I’m sorry, Greg...are you saying you’re tired?” His hand is creeping slowly across Greg’s upper thigh, making his intention clear but giving Greg plenty of time to act. He doesn’t. “You’re tired of me making you come harder than anyone has made you come in your whole ineffectual little life?”

And that’s the thing, is that objectively he’s not. So he does let Tom slip his fingers gently around his very, very tired dick and wring him to another useless, stupid orgasm. )

He’s not, like, sexually inexperienced by any means, but sex has never been this much of a factor in his life before. He basically organizes his life around sex now. Around sex with Tom.

Well, not just sex, although that is the main course, so to say. They like...hang out. They do stuff before they have sex, or sometimes afterwards Greg will put something on the TV in his bedroom and Tom will stay huddled next to him in bed until it’s over. Maybe that makes them, like, friends with benefits more than fuckbuddies. Either way, they’re not exclusively fucking.

They’re also not technically fucking. 

He hasn’t missed that Tom is clearly evading all mentions of doing anything near anyone’s asshole, which honestly--Greg can live with that for now. He’s fairly occupied with learning and filing away every single thing there is to know about Tom’s dick, so yeah, he’ll live. And if he sometimes still resorts to that old fantasy of riding said dick in Tom’s office chair at Waystar, then, like, whatever.

It’s a lot of this, right now: Greg on his knees, Tom perched on the end of the bed, one hand pressed flat against the comforter to support the arch of his back as he cants his hips up into Greg’s mouth. The other hand holds a tight grip on Greg’s scalp. Aggressive Tom.

“Oh, yeah? You like that?” Tom says. He always talks like this, like an uncreative porn star. “You like making daddy feel good?”

Greg pulls off, choking a little. “Maybe, uh--” he starts. “Maybe not that one.”

“Okay,” Tom says right away. “Sure, uh.” He uncomfortably drums his hands on his thighs while Greg wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Sorry, it’s just…kinda weird, to me.”

“No, sure, I get it,” Tom says, tone too light, too casual. “What about...like, could I call you a slut?”

Greg thinks on it, noting the sort of fluttery feeling it gives him under his sternum. “Yeah, slut’s cool.”

“Great.”

They stare at each other for a long moment, neither of them totally sure how to get back into it. But Greg watches when Tom’s gaze darkens and can tell when he’s looking at his lips instead of his eyes, so he’s already on his feet and pressing Tom backwards into the mattress by the time Tom says, “Get your slut mouth back here.”

He splays out on top, holding Tom down by his forearms just to feel him squirm. He lets the head of his cock drag over the length of Tom’s, deliberate enough to make them both gasp, but then sort of plays keep-away with his hips, inhibiting Tom from the friction he so clearly wants. “Tell me you want me,” Tom says.

“I want you,” he says. He does.

Again, “Tell me you want me.” He’s Needy Tom now, probably embarrassed about the whole “daddy” thing and wanting validation. It would be easy to withhold from him, to drag it out until Tom is legitimately begging for it, and while that could have its own sexy perks...Greg doesn’t really want to. He does want Tom. He wants to say it.

“I want you,” he says. “I want you.” And then he spits in his hands and uses both of them to lovingly stroke Tom’s cock until he is coming loudly and desperately all over the both of them.

It takes him longer than normal to recover, and when he returns the favor it’s not even his best work, but Greg is so keyed up from watching Tom’s dick throb and spurt all over his hands that it’s only a minute or two before he’s stuttering and muffling his own cries into Tom’s neck.

Tom rubs his free hand over Greg’s spine, a flat palm that curls into knuckles brushing over the notches of his spine, and whispers things like, “You’re good,” and “You did good,” while Greg catches his breath. It’s, like, genuinely very soothing, which in turn is disconcerting because it’s Tom. He never talks like this. Greg didn’t think he was capable of more than high-strung demands and weird, sexy insults.

It makes him want to splay out on his stomach with an arm stretched over Tom’s chest and his head burrowed in the crook of his neck, just so Tom will keep holding him and petting him like this. And he thinks, yeah why not, and does exactly that, going as far to wiggle a knee in between Tom’s calves so they’re basically touching all along the lengths of their bodies.

“You okay?” Tom asks. His right hand, which was just on Greg’s cock, comes to curl around his bicep.

“Mmhmm.” Greg closes his eyes. “Just feels nice.”

“Oh.” A second later, Tom tilts his head enough to rest it on top of Greg’s, his cheek pressed into Greg’s hair.

Neither of them makes a move to turn on the TV to drown out the silence, there’s no hustle to put their pants back on so they can sit side-by-side in the bed “as friends.” There’s a delicate sort of calm, the kind that could be burst so easily. He doesn’t want to talk about the “daddy” thing, because he’s not sure how to explain that he has daddy issues but not those kind of daddy issues in a way that wouldn’t lead to Tom getting defensive or just, like, dismissive. What he wants is to lay here all night just like this and to not have to talk at all.

That’s becoming sort of an issue. The wanting. It always seems like there’s more to want. First Tom’s attention and approval, which gave way really easily to wanting his touch, and it should be enough, but he wants…something he can’t let himself even think about wanting.

He never considered himself a greedy person before, but maybe that’s just something he picked up from the Roys. Now he’s somebody who’s swallowed songbirds and blackmailed his boss, and then started hooking up with that boss and didn’t feel bad about it. Maybe he’s just full of want now and won’t stop until he’s, like, eaten every songbird to extinction.

Tom starts to shift underneath him, the hand on Greg’s back sliding up to his neck. Tom squeezes, massaging the muscles there lightly.

“Buddy, I uh, hate to kill the mood,” Tom says after a long while, but still too soon for Greg’s liking, “but I’m gonna have to cancel our Saturday, uh, plans.”

“Oh.” The plans he’s referring to are the ones Greg made when he discovered that Tom had never seen any of the Alien movies. They were supposed to watch them, or at least the good ones, over takeout. Like buddies. There was also some vague talk about attempting sixty-nineing, but that wasn’t gonna be, like, the whole night.

Tom removes his hand from Greg’s arm to gesture vaguely. “Shiv has a banquet thing for women in politics, very...D.C.-corporate-lib stuff, you get it.”

“No, I mean, it’s fine.” Greg shifts off his stomach and sits up next to Tom, no longer feeling that desperate desire to be pressed together head to toe. He shrugs, like it’s nothing. “You gotta go, right? You’re her husband.”

“I-- yeah, I guess,” Tom says. The corners of his lips curl up in that creepy sort of way, which usually happens when he’s overcompensating. “Be pretty suspicious if Shiv Roy’s husband didn’t show? Like what, is he having an affair?” Tom laughs, hard.

“Hah, yeah,” he huffs, pushing a smile. “Wouldn’t want that.”

“Okay.” Tom’s eyebrows pull together, like he’s confused and also pissed about it. 

“It’s honestly cool, ‘cause there’s this bakery place down the street I’ve been kinda curious about-- they have this thing called a bialy, I saw it on the Sopranos, but it's like a bagel from Slovakia I think--”

“You’re not mad?” Tom presses. What, does he seem mad? He feels like he’s doing a pretty good job of not seeming mad. 

“No, Tom, I get it,” he says firmly, sort of losing his patience. “I mean, we’re all adults here, right?”

Tom goes kind of blank for a second, then nods and says, “Yeah, you’re right. I dunno why I..” he shrugs instead of finishing the sentence. 

“It’s cool.” Greg smiles, reaching for his shirt. “Did you wanna watch something?”

Tom sighs and groans as he pushes himself up, at least one of his joints audibly cracking. Greg smirks -- old. “No, I should probably make my exit.” He swings his legs off the bed and stands with his back towards Greg. “I have to get home to my wife,” he says pointedly.

“Yeah, yeah.” He kinda wishes Tom would just yell at him and get it over with. This, whatever this is, is just, like, confusing and upsetting. “Uh, did you wanna-- like, is there a time next week you’re free?” They always try to make plans in person like this to avoid leaving a text trail. So far, it’s led to pretty consistent meetups.

“Uhhh...” Tom makes a face like he’s wracking his brain for his calendar -- which Greg knows he doesn’t have memorized, he used to schedule Tom’s fucking teeth cleanings for him -- and says, waving a hand, “I dunno. You’ll hear from me.”

Greg just nods and helps Tom find the rest of his clothes, then walks him to the door. Tom leans in like he’s going to kiss him, but then it’s just a half-hug with one arm. They both pat each other, firm, like bros do. Greg wants to laugh.

Tom leaves, and it’s fine.

That night he watches Alien 3 alone, and he thinks about what Tom said about them having an affair. Affair. It’s the first time he really feels like somebody’s mistress. And tonight really makes it feel true. He follows where Tom leads. Tom’s wife has a banquet, so he rearranges his schedule. If he could, Tom would probably have his assistant pencil Greg in. 

And it makes him feel bad, but not for the right reasons. 

“Oh, Sigourney,” he says to the screen just as Ripley realizes there’s an alien embryo growing inside of her, “we’re so fucked.”

—

When he’s sixteen, he gets caught smoking cigarettes in the biology greenhouse with Amy Mishman after band practice, and it’s not really a first strike for either of them. Amy gets off easier because she’s a girl and also because her uncle is one of the volleyball coaches, but Greg gets saddled with detention and something the school is calling “correctional service.”

Correctional service turns out to just be, like, free labor. The kids who get caught doing drugs or fighting are forced to clean out storage rooms or dig up weeds in courtyards, mostly so the school doesn’t have to hire actual contractors to do any of it. 

So for six weeks, Greg is stationed in the auditorium during free period with Landon Driscoll, stripping layers of dried paint off the stage. Landon Driscoll is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty normal dude. Not exceptionally good in school, but good enough to pass. Pretty quiet. On the track team. Not really the kind of guy Greg would expect to be in mega-detention with the burnouts.

“So,” he says on the first day, twenty minutes into the two of them peeling flakes of black and brown paint off the grimy stage, sitting fifteen feet away from each other, “what’re you in for?”

Landon jams his paint scraper at the stage, sort of ineffectively. “Dude, I’m just gonna say this right now…this is not going to be a Breakfast Club thing. I don’t think we should feel any pressure to get to know each other.”

“Yeah, no, that’s…” Greg spreads more paint stripper onto a mound of blue paint in a corner. “That’s what I was gonna say, like. Agreed. I don’t even like The Breakfast Club that much, so.”

Landon keeps his promise for the first week, and never acknowledges Greg when they see each other between classes, even though Greg is still in the habit of waving or at least smiling. He can’t pretend he doesn’t know someone. It’s rude.

He also can’t pretend he doesn’t have eyes. Landon Driscoll isn’t, like, a bombshell or anything, but he’s not...difficult to look at. He has a strong build for their age, a nice face. He’s tall, but not “disproportionate” like Greg. He doesn’t look inbred like the rest of the track team, although he does have a military-esque haircut that makes him look more severe than he actually is.

Greg silently watches him scrape paint for a few days, and by day three he’s basically getting through by imagining the two of them are, like, building a deck together.

Plainly speaking, Greg is fixated on him. He knows he’s gay already -- that was already an internal crisis like two years ago. The issue now is that he hasn’t done anything about it yet. It’s one thing to be so horny he feels like his dick is going to shrivel off, but it’s another thing to be, like, having little fantasies about guys at school. Especially guys like Landon Driscoll. Straight ones.

His mom once called him a glutton for punishment, though that was mostly because he kept drinking so many glasses of milk at the Country Town Buffet that he upset his tummy and had to throw up in the parking lot. It feels apt now, even though she would never say it about this situation. She doesn’t even know he’s gay.

(Amy Mishman once called him a closet case, and it made him so immediately livid that he called her a “muff-diver” and stumble-ran out from under the bleachers. That was the first time they got caught smoking, which made Amy more mad than the “muff-diver” thing did.)

Point is. Landon Driscoll doesn’t know he’s gay either, and that’s definitely how Greg would like to keep things. 

In their second week, Landon is the one who breaks their silence. “So what’s your deal?” he asks. “Are you actually this much of a moron, or is it all an act?”

Greg blinks. “That’s, uh, kind of a loaded question? ‘Cuz, like…there’s no act--”

“So you are a moron?” 

“See, that’s sort of the conclusion I was hoping to avoid?” 

Landon shrugs, his back to Greg. “My friend told me you’re in band.”

He is, actually, but he doesn’t see why that matters now. “What, did you like...scope me out?” He grins, aiming for playful. “Tryin’ to get the dirt on ol’ Hirschmeister?” He has literally never called himself that.

Landon just shrugs again. “You’re in trouble for smoking, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Greg admits. He shakes his head, “Sorry, are you, like...gonna hit me?”

That was the wrong thing to say. “No! Fuck off, dude--”

“No, I mean-- just because you said we shouldn’t talk the other day? And this seems like...sort of the opposite of that?”

“Maybe I changed my mind.”

He gulps. It’s literally nothing, but it makes Greg feel sort of tingly anyway. Landon wants to get to know him. Or, well -- doesn’t actively not want to get to know him anymore. “So...what did you get in trouble for?”

Landon levels him with a glare. “Like you don’t know.”

“I literally don’t?” Greg says.

Landon turns away from him again. They’re closer than they’ve ever been before, only five feet between them, but Landon has a way of making Greg feel particularly alone when he closes off. And every time, Greg, who is a glutton for punishment, just wishes more and more that he knew how to pry him open. “I got in a fight at track practice,” Landon says to the wall. “Punched one of the other dudes.”

“Oh, shit!” Greg sort of laughs. “Who, uh-- who?”

“You know Eli Prow?”

Greg nods, a little taken aback. Eli Prow is insanely well-liked, both very athletic and generally pretty nice. His dad is the coach of some lacrosse team, but Eli never really brags about it except to throw insane parties at their house. Greg has never heard of anyone being mad at Eli Prow. “What for?”

Landon Driscoll doesn’t answer, and they’re quiet again until the bell rings.

By week three, they are actually talking semi-consistently, although about what Greg couldn’t really say. They have a few overlapping interests: Greg knows enough about hockey to sustain a conversation about it, they both watch Lost but don’t really understand it, and they both like Radiohead, but in a casual way, not like a red flag way. 

The fact that he knows almost nothing about Landon is almost part of the obsession, at this point. He feels sort of giddy with opportunity. To figure him all out. To see what he’s into. And if he happens to discover Landon has a proclivity for dudes in the process...then cool.

Landon does stop ignoring him in the hallways. They don’t, like, chat. But they wave. Smile. On Wednesday, Greg says “Nice shirt!”, which actually makes Landon smile, but then he accidentally says it again when they see each other during Correctional Service and feels like a boob.

“It’s fine, dude,” Landon laughs when Greg actually apologizes for it. “It’s a rad shirt.”

“Man,” Greg says a few minutes later. “Are we supposed to finish the whole stage for this? ‘Cuz, like, at this rate, dude...I don’t think it’s even in the cards.” The stage is, at best, a third of the way finished, and that’s not accounting for touch-ups. It’s a poorly-funded school: there’s like 20 years’ worth of paint on this shit.

“No, it’s fine,” Landon says, not even fazed. “They’re just gonna throw two more dipshits in here when we’re done.”

“It’s kinda fucked up, when you think about it,” Greg says. “Like...making minors do your work for you?”

“Oh, yeah, no--” Landon nods, tossing his paint scraper to the side. “It’s probably not even totally legal.”

“We’re basically...servants.”

“It’s like we’re house elves,” Landon says, chuckling.

Greg laughs, but still says, “What?”

“You know. From Harry Potter.”

“Oh.” Greg shrugs. “Yeah, I don’t, like, love sci-fi.”

Landon laughs again. He really can’t stop thinking how nice it sounds.

“Do you ever wonder, like…” Landon starts to ask, his eyes fixated on the ripples of dried paint on his scraper. He shakes his head, re-thinking. “No, okay I guess...If you could go anywhere in the world, and live anywhere, and money didn’t matter, where would you go?”

Greg shrugs. “I don’t know off the top of my head.” He really doesn’t. “I haven’t been to that many places.”

“I haven’t either, I just…” He’s staring off, almost wistfully. “I feel like there’s gotta be better places...than this, right?”

“Yeah, I mean,” Greg nods, “like, I hear Halifax is super choice--”

“Places where you can be happier,” Landon says, quiet. Like he doesn’t even realize he said it.

Greg nods. “I dunno, man,” he says after a second. “I’m feel, like...pretty happy right now.”

Landon semi-glares at him from the corner of his eye, but then he breaks and grins. “Fuck off, bro.” 

Greg laughs at an appropriately masculine level. “For real, though, this job is like...labor. I’m actually getting kind of concerned about my back and stuff?” He stretches his legs out long in front of him, trying to relieve some of the tension in his joints. He doesn’t miss the way Landon’s eyes track down the length of them. 

In week four, Landon Driscoll kisses him. Rushed and sloppy, and just seconds before the bell rings so he has a quick out, but he does kiss him. So the next day, Greg waits until they’re both gloved up and smearing paint thinner all over the place to gather enough courage to snatch Landon’s wrist and reel him in.

Landon doesn’t pull away, he just dives in tongue-first and fumbles to take off Greg’s gloves-- “You’re gonna get fucking...paint shit all over--”

Greg flings both gloves off with a flick of his wrist, and slowly, then all at once, puts his hands on the top curve of Landon’s ass. He moans, and Greg feels like he could...kill God, maybe? He feels enormous. It’s thrilling.

On Friday, Landon pulls him into one of the old costume closets before he’s even put his backpack down and yanks him by the collar into a bite-y, wet mouth kiss. Greg throws his stuff to the side and pushes Landon, stumbling, into a wardrobe rack, mouths hot and panting.

“You’re good with your tongue,” Landon says, ballsy, and Greg’s on his knees before he knows it, like he has any idea what he’s doing. Like he’s ever done anything like this in his whole life. 

He reaches for Landon’s fly, but he stops him with a hand on his head. “Wait. I wanna just say, like…” Landon shifts a little on his feet. “I’m not, like…”

Greg refrains from rolling his eyes. Sure he isn’t. “Yeah, I know,” and gets to work on making Landon Driscoll feel better than he’s ever felt. 

It hits him at some point that he’s kneeling in a closet at school, where anyone could find him, and it only makes him have to press his fist against his own erection. He feels...well, naughty isn’t the right word, but whatever the adult, un-creepy version of naughty is. Bad, but in a fun way. A way that means you’re doing something you’ve wanted to do forever.

He pulls off in time to make sure Landon comes on his own hand, but Landon pushes him away when he tries to kiss him afterwards. “Dude, dick breath.”

Greg shoves him, blushing. “Fuck off, man.”

Beginning of week five, he tells Amy on the lawn after band practice. First that he’s into Landon Driscoll, but then that he also thinks Landon Driscoll could be into him.

Amy rolls her eyes. “You’re pulling a me-in-freshman-year.”

“That’s totally different--”

“How?”

“Because!” He pauses for dramatic effect. “You and Keisha never...” he trails off, hoping she takes his suggestive look as a suggestive one. 

Amy’s mouth drops in slow motion. “You did not.”

Greg shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Did you kiss him?” Greg smiles. “Did you have sex with him?”

“Define sex,” he says, a little more unsure.

Amy’s face falls. “You gave him a blowjob and he didn’t reciprocate.” 

“I--” He sighs. “Yes.

“Greg,” she starts to say, reaching for her Marlboros. “I don’t--”

“Dude,” he says before she can continue. “I know what you’re gonna say, but just...don’t? Please?” He runs his hands through his hair. “This could be really cool for me, you know?”

“Did he tell you he was straight before you did it?”

He throws his arms up. “Dude, like-- what, were you listening? How could you know about that?”

“Because, Greg, I have been a lot gayer than you for a lot longer!” She presses her hands to her forehead, cigarette still dangling from her fingers. She looks like she could be his cool stepmom. “Okay, so guys who are ‘straight’”, she literally does airquotes, like he’s a stupid kid, “are always going to be happy to let you suck their dicks, as long as they can no-homo it afterwards!”

“I disagree.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Why would he--” He scratches at his chin. He wants to ask for her cigarette, but that would feel like surrendering. “He wouldn’t want to kiss somebody...me...if he didn’t at least…”

Amy looks so sad for him, which just makes him want to stand up and stomp his feet, like he’s eight years old and Miss Fisher just knows he couldn’t possibly be related to the real Logan Roy, because he’s just stupid fucking Greg.

“Nobody has ever looked at me, Amy.” He feels choked by it, the admission and the aching sort of bitterness it pulls out of him. “In my whole life.”

He runs off then without saying goodbye, and Amy doesn’t sit with him at the lunch the next day, but it’s fine. Because he’s kind of trying to prove a point here. He’s allowed to be a little petty.

He sees Landon a few times in the hall, and he waves, but Landon is...not really seeing him? Like, he’s just distracted by something else every time he and Greg are in the same vicinity. Which is fine, because it almost makes it more fun when they do get to see each other. Kind of a fun...secret.

Or it seems like one, until Landon actually says, “You shouldn’t talk to me in the halls.”

“Oh,” Greg says. Part of him is already formulating an obedient response, but then he catches himself. “Hmm.” He’s quiet for a long moment. “Why?” he asks, then. 

Landon squirms -- like he didn’t think Greg would possibly ask why. “Just because…I mean, come on, you know.”

Greg shakes his head. Now, he actually is playing dumb. Joke’s on Landon, apparently. “I really don’t.”

Landon huffs. “Okay, you want me to say it? People will suspect shit if they see me talking to you. Because everyone knows...what you are.”

“Which is…?” He almost likes the way Landon’s face goes white. “What, that I like to suck dick?” He crosses his arms. “What am I?

Landon opens his mouth, like he might actually be able to say it, but he quickly scoffs. “You’re being...like, a girl about this.”

“Sorry I’m not enough of a dude for you, Landon,” he spits, and they don’t talk for the rest of the period.

He’s still sort of steamed about it the next day. He still hasn’t really made up with Amy, because he doesn’t want to tell her she was right, but there’s a part of him that’s still holding out for Correctional Service. Like maybe if he and Landon can just talk it over...

But then he has a better idea.

He corners Landon at his locker, and doesn’t give him a chance to avoid his eye contact or run away. He braces one arm up against the locker as a barrier. He pushes himself to his full height, an advantage that he doesn’t always remember he has.

“I’m a person,” Greg says. “You shouldn’t treat me like I’m less than you.” 

Landon gapes at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Dude, come on.” He leans in close enough to half-whisper. “I, like...I care about you, man...but I have to stand up for myself.” Landon’s starting to turn red, tugging anxiously on his collar. Good, Greg thinks. “I’m not gonna let you just use me whenever you want.” 

There’s definitely people who can hear them. He can tell by the way Landon keeps looking around to see if people are listening, and then those people look back with expressions that say, “Yes, we can definitely hear you!”

And Landon Driscoll says, loud enough for those people around to hear, “Greg, could you stop being such a needy fucking fag?”

Week six, he fakes an illness and skips school.

Kind of.

What really happens is that his mom finds him dry-heave-sobbing in his car in the driveway, hands still clenched on the wheel. He doesn’t remember getting home. She flings his car door open so hard, her face so white, he wonders if he’s actually injured somehow. 

His mom puts both of her hands on his face, tries to use her thumbs to wipe his tears. Pretty much the only time he can remember her doing anything like that. “Greg, what’s wrong?”

He can’t speak for a long time, and then when he does, he lies. “I-- my stoma--hach...hurts so bad--”

She rushes him to the hospital, which he feels a little guilty for, but not enough to tell her what he was actually crying about. When she’s helping him inside and hurrying him to the front desk, he’s feeling calmer than before, but sort of disoriented, and it’s easy enough to keep his tears rolling just enough to be believable.

Like, he still wants to bawl his fucking eyes out. He’s just not having a mental breakdown anymore.

It turns into a whole experience because, obviously, they don’t find anything wrong with his stomach. He already had his appendix out when he was a kid, and he doesn’t have gallstones or anything. They keep him doing tests in the hospital for the rest of the week, which is kind of ideal, really, in terms of avoiding…

He decides not to think about him ever again. 

They don’t find anything wrong with any of him, truthfully, even though they could if they did a single psychiatric exam. He feels like a psycho. Like a dumb fucking kid. Like a stupid little earthworm. Just letting himself get crushed.

At a certain point, he figures his stomach pain should “subside,” and he and the doctors write it off as some weird mega-indigestion. He can tell that his mom isn’t so sure.

“Don’t ever do anything like that to me again,” she says on the car ride home. “I swear to fucking Christ, Gregory, if you ever scare me like that…'' She sounds almost...not verklempt, but affected, maybe. And then dry, almost funny when she says, “There better be something wrong with you next time.”

He smiles. “I’ll do my best.”

He never, ever tells her the truth. To this day, she still refers to it as the “Phantom Appendix Incident,” and she eagerly tells everyone about it at Greg’s graduation dinner, and also most of his birthdays since.

Greg almost wonders if it’s her own way of asking him to just be honest with her. But he really doesn’t know how.

\---

“I really think you’re gonna like it,” Greg says from where he sits on the floor, hunched over the glass coffee table, pinching the edges of the rolling paper together.

Tom scoffs from behind him on the couch. “Greg, I’m not some country bumpkin. I went to college, I’ve smoked pot before.”

Greg chuckles. “Pot,” he mutters. “Nobody under the age of forty says pot, you know.”

“Weed, grass, whatever.” Tom is red in the face. “It’s all the same.”

“That’s the thing, is it’s not though,” Greg uses the drawstring on his hoodie to pack the weed in. “Ever since I got my med card, I can get legal weed and it’s like, way more pure.”

Tom says, disbelievingly, “What do you have a med card for?”

Greg smirks, using air quotes: “Chronic pain.” Tom laughs, genuine, and the sound is a relief.

They had gone almost two weeks without seeing each other after the not-fight. Greg had felt compelled more than a few times to break the silence and text him, but didn’t because, one, Tom would eviscerate him if he broke their no texting rule, and two, he kind of wanted to see how long it would take for Tom to break. He was feeling bitter. Jilted, maybe. Whatever.

And Tom had been the one to break in the end, twelve days after they last saw each other, showing up at Greg’s door in the middle of the day just to urgently kiss him, teeth first, and suck his brain out through his dick before either of them could say a word. 

“Missed this,” Tom had panted against his throat while Greg jerked him off, and it felt better than an apology. 

They haven’t talked about that night, but it’s probably better that way. He still doesn’t understand what Tom was so pissed about, but then again, he’s not even sure that pissed is right. For all he knows, he’s overthinking it and Tom was just busy for those twelve days. 

Hey. It could happen.

He finishes twisting the end of the joint and lights it carefully, evenly. He takes a long, slow hit and sighs his exhale. The smoke warms him inside and lifts his mind away from shitty thoughts. Tom is here. Things are chill.

He passes the joint back to him. “Don’t forget to inhale, don’t just hold it in your mouth—”

“Gregory, I swear to fuck…” He watches Tom’s lips wrap around the filter, damp from Greg’s spit. That’s hot for some indescribable reason. Tom meets his eyes as he takes a pull, and then turns away almost instantly to hack into his elbow.

Greg smirks in spite of himself. “Hey hey, take it easy, old man.” He crawls back up onto the couch to rub Tom’s back. He takes a glass of water from the coffee table and holds it up to Tom’s. “Here,” he says, and is surprised when Tom just leans in towards the rim of the cup and lets Greg sort of pour the water into his mouth. It reminds him of the Bible for some reason, in like a vague way. (He wonders absently if Tom would let him wash his feet, before banishing the thought.)

“Good lord,” Tom says when he’s got the wind back in him. “That is...strong.”

“It’s the stuff they give to people with Parkinson’s,” Greg says proudly.

The next drag Tom takes is slower and shorter, and his prize is that he doesn’t hack up a lung like a freshman at Brown. He passes the joint back to Greg, and their fingers tangle around the roach for a brief moment. “It’s a good view,” Tom says, gesturing to the sweeping windows like he’s never seen them before.

“Mmmhmm.” Greg inhales. His throat burns, and the heat between the two of them is radiating. They’re not touching except to pass the joint back and forth, but Greg can feel how close they are. “It’s like...kinda bananas.”

“Not bad for a Canadian hayseed. Guess Kendall’s your actual sugar daddy.” He holds his palms up, fingers splayed, feigning sheepishness.“Sorry, am I allowed to say that word?” 

Greg feels light, airy, so he just laughs. “Your dick’s not out, so it’s fine.”

“Oh, I see.” Tom smiles. He’s already so stoned, it’s obvious. He’s got that glassy sheen over his eyes, and he’s staring out the window like he’s mesmerized. Or he’s just staring off into space, hard to say. Greg watches him out of the corner of his eye, and he jolts a little when Tom finally speaks. “Would you...like that?” He clears his throat, lowers his eyes to his lap. “If I bought you more...nice things?”

“Uhhh…” Greg tries to actually think about it. The thought of Tom sizing him up in a department store for suits and nice shirts and things is equal parts thrilling and intimidating. He shrugs. “I mean, you kinda already did. You made me eat a bird, dude.”

Tom scoffs. “Made you eat a bird. Familial wealth was wasted on you.” He reaches for the dwindling joint again. Greg lets his fingers brush against Tom’s deliberately, running them down the back of his hand before he pulls away. He’s getting antsy-- he wants to kiss him.

He’s staring at Tom’s profile. He’s high enough already that he doesn’t care to pretend he’s not staring, and he slides his fingers over the short hairs at the side of Tom’s head. He fans his fingers out wide, thumb pressed into the divot of his temple. He feels warm when Tom leans into it.

“Hey,” Greg says, low and scratchy. Tom leans in easily, hands coming up to grasp at Greg’s shoulders, lips meeting his lazily. It’s exactly what Greg was hoping would happen. It’s so easy to be together like this when they don’t have to talk about any of it.

Their mouths glide together inelegantly, and Greg takes the time to run the fingers of his other hand over the shell of Tom’s ear, down his hairline to stroke at his nape, then back around to the jut of his jaw. When Greg was a kid, there was this one month where he was just, like, convinced he was going to go blind for some reason, so he prepared for the worst by closing his eyes and learning things by touch only (until his mom finally yelled at him for getting fingerprints all over everything). This reminds him of that, and how he could probably pick Tom’s forehead out of a lineup using only his hands if he needed to. 

The thought makes him giggle into Tom’s mouth and then reach up with his thumb to smooth over the wrinkles between his eyebrows. “What are you doing?” Tom mumbles but doesn’t pull away, which counts as a win.

“I dunno,” Greg says, his lips sliding sloppy-slick up along Tom’s cheek. “Jus’ wanna touch you.”

Tom chuckles, his own hands trailing up to tug on Greg’s hair. “Well, then. Onward and upward, my boy.”

Greg snorts. “You sound like the Great Gatsby.”

Tom snakes his arms around Greg’s waist to haul him closer. “Oh, very astute literary reference, Gregory. What hidden depths lie behind those mindless meerkat eyes of yours?”

“Dude, that’s like-- like, I read that in high school, everyone knows The Great Gatsby.” Why are they talking about this? He feels, like, itchy with how much he wants their clothes off right now. “Shut up about books,” he says, trying to sound commanding.

He’s basically hovering over Tom now, using the strength of his hands to tilt Tom’s head back and up to kiss him, firmer and more deliberate than before. Maybe it’s the weed clouding his judgment, or the fact that Tom ghosting him for twelve days has given him some sort of unspoken upper hand, but there’s nothing that stops him from asking, “Can I, uh, ask you something?”

Tom hums affirmatively, rucking Greg’s shirt up mid-chest.

“What’s the...over-under on you, like, letting me finger you at some point?”

Tom freezes and shifts away in one fluid motion. “Oh. Uh. Really?” He scrunches up his face in distaste.

“Yeah, I just...feel like we’re kinda running out of steam on the HJs and BJs front? Like we’ve exhausted all our options.”

“I feel like I have an abundance of options,” Tom says, reaching between Greg’s legs to palm at him through his sweatpants. 

“So you don’t want to,” he says, then immediately is kicking himself for the way it makes Tom pull back entirely, smushing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“I don’t-- I just haven’t thought about it.” He’s stupid flustered. “I mean, it’s something...something that you’d want? I mean, have you…done that before?” 

“Have I-- yeah, I’ve fingered a guy before, Tom.” Tom seems almost insistent on believing that he was Greg’s dick-awakening because, well, otherwise he’d have to talk about Greg being not-straight and how fucking Greg makes Tom seem pretty not-straight too. But they’re super not talking about that, and Greg knows better than to push it.

“Right. Yeah, yeah. Of course you have.”

He runs his fingers along Tom’s arm, trying to tease but mostly feeling needy. “It was just a suggestion. We don’t have to.”

“No, wait-- could we. Could you…you could teach me how to do it? To you?”

“Oh.” Greg beams. “Yeah, of course.” This is a better response than he expected. “It’ll be easy, it’s not that different…it’s not that complex, I mean,” he says. He would say it’s not that different from fingering a woman, but he doesn’t actually know that. He figures it’ll be better to show Tom than to tell him, and he hauls them both back to his bedroom for a demonstration.

As far as learning experiences go, it’s a pretty resounding success? It’s definitely kinda weird for a while because Tom is weird and he’s pathologically incapable of just being quiet or sincere during anything, but he’s a quick learner, and as he learns he gets more confident and less...annoying. It helps that just like, the concept of a part of Tom being inside part of Greg is deeply overwhelming. From the moment he guided Tom’s fingers to wetly stroke around and then inside his ass, his libido has been like, spring loaded. Tom could say any number of embarrassing things as long as he keeps stroking Greg’s taint with his thumb.

“Is this…” Tom asks, two fingers slicked up and working in and out of him without Greg’s assistance now. “I mean, how does it feel?”

“It’s good,” Greg says, breathy. He reaches his own hand down to stroke Tom’s wrist. “Feels good.”

It does feel good, better than good, but his brain is too fuzzy to say much more than that. That’s the weed again, dulling his senses but sort of heightening all sensations. He imagines a PSA voiceover in his head: This is your sex life normally. Now this is your sex life on drugs. 

“Okay, the laughing is not really reassuring me…” Tom says, already halfway to pulling his fingers out.

“No, wait!” Greg grabs him by the arm before he can stop. “I wasn’t laughing at you, I swear.” He didn’t even realize he was laughing.

Tom still looks skeptical. Greg rolls his eyes. “Dude, just...come here.” He props himself up on an elbow and reaches to tug Tom’s head down into a kiss. He grabs and nudges him into lying more comfortably on his side instead of hovering over him, and the way it changes the angle of Tom’s fingers is very-- “Oh, holy fuck.”

“Hmm? Really?” Tom’s eyes are lit up, close to beaming. Greg nods, sort of panting.

“Yeah. Very, uh, well done.” He thrusts his fingers again, curling them in the same way as before, and Greg gasps, bracing his hand on the meat of Tom’s shoulder. “Dude, fuck.” On impulse, without much thought, he presses his thumb into the swell of Tom’s lower lip, further into his mouth. This is a thing people do that’s sexy, and it is kind of hot to have Tom biting and tonguing at his thumb, it mostly just makes him want to make out. So he does, replacing his thumb with his mouth and crushing their faces together. And all-in-all, he feels fucking amazing. Tom is finger-fucking him within an inch of his life, and Tom is kissing him. The two concepts are thrilling enough on their own, but this legitimately rules.

“I want you,” he says of his own accord, making sure to look Tom in the eyes as he does, and then he watches in satisfaction as Tom’s pupils blow wide and he proceeds to wreck Greg’s shit into the next fiscal year.

Later, as they’re both washing themselves off at the bathroom sink, Tom snaps the waistband of Greg’s boxers and says, “Shame you got kicked out of the family.” He slides in close and rubs a hand down Greg’s lower back. “I keep having this sort of...fantasy, I guess. About sneaking away to some clandestine spot at family Christmas.”

“With me?” Greg turns so they’re face-to-face, Tom’s hand sliding around to his hips.

“Yes, with you, who else?” 

“I dunno,” Greg says, deciding to play it off as a joke. “You and Gerri seem very close, sometimes.”

“I think I’m too old for Gerri’s taste,” Tom mutters, which, Greg makes a mental note to ask for the intel on what that means later, but then Tom continues: “Don’t you ever think about the yacht?”

Greg blinks, taken aback. They haven’t talked about anything from the yacht since Tom and Shiv had their not-divorce. So many things from that weekend that neither of them are willing to discuss, and that Greg mostly wishes he could forget, but this...

“Yeah. I do,” he says, honestly.

“I remember how excited I was,” Tom says, a gleam in his eye. Greg smiles, hands pressing gently into Tom’s cheeks. “It was sort of riveting to think that anyone could have walked in and seen us.”

Greg nods, hands falling down to Tom’s shoulders. He remembers it feeling riveting, too, but not at all because of the possibility that they could get caught. Just because it was him, and it was Tom, and Tom was touching him. 

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s too bad. About the Christmas party.”

Tom hums, his hands stroking along Greg’s ribs. “I could always come to you afterwards. You could wait up for me.”

“Mmm, yeah.” He’s mostly sober now, but still hazy with how much he wants to kiss him. He feels like a teenager with how much he thinks about kissing these days.

Tom leans in close, their noses slotting together. “I could fuck you,” he says.

“Ho- oh my god, yeah, that sounds...excellent,” he says, trying to keep the strangled tone from his voice. “But I can’t.”

“Why not?” Tom kisses him underneath his jaw, tender, hot. 

“I’m spending Christmas in Canada. With my mom and grandpa.” He slides his hands under Tom’s satiny, overpriced underwear just to palm sort of lazily at his ass.

“Don’t go,” Tom says like it’s simple, and when he curls his tongue around Greg’s earlobe like that, it does seem kinda simple.

“Yeah,” he basically sighs. “But I really can’t. My grandpa, like, put me back in his will this year, it’s a whole thing now--”

Tom groans, hamming it up. “What a fucking drag, man.” He pushes away, casually enough, and heads back to the bedroom. Greg tries to catch his wrist as he goes, but their fingers just sort of pull against each other before breaking apart and falling to their sides again. “You’re gonna be watching CSPAN with Rip Van Winkle when you could be at home getting fucked like a milkmaid.”

This feels like a fever dream. “Well, when you put it that way…” Greg fidgets at the faucet for a second, then gives up the game and follows Tom back to bed. He’s sitting up against the headboard, scrolling through his phone idly, his legs tucked under the sheets. They’re nice sheets, and they’re from Tom. He had claimed that Greg’s sheets were giving him an allergic reaction, so he bought replacement ones for purely selfish reasons. Greg thinks that he wanted an excuse to give Greg something nice. Either way, they’re good sheets.

He slides in next to him, burrows up to his chin and rests his forehead near Tom’s hip, just inches from his hand. Strong fingers. He hopes he can still get Tom to play with his hair before he goes to sleep. “It’s not that I wouldn’t prefer to be...you know.”

“Fucked like a milkmaid?”

He laughs. It sounds so stupid and still kind of makes him feel fluttery and horny. “Yeah.” He leans in, quickly kisses the top of Tom’s hand. “But I’m not gonna organize my life around it.”

Tom nods. “Hmm, yeah.” He clicks his phone off and sets it to the side. “I’m gonna go to sleep now.”

“Okay…?” It’s pretty early still, at least by their standards. He narrows his eyes, hoping Tom will maybe elaborate, but he’s being weird and quiet.

Tom smiles, then turns to flip off the light and worm under the covers. Greg stares at the curve of his back in the dark for a long moment. He doesn’t understand how this happens. How they can have the kind of night that they did and have the best time that at least Greg personally has had in a long time, and then still end up here at the end of the night, feeling weird and hollow and unsure. 

He falls asleep facing Tom, hands to himself on the opposite end of the bed, and he doesn’t even realize he’s fallen asleep until he’s waking again in the dark to the sound of something sort of...wet. Then a few seconds later is unmistakably the sound of someone sniffling.

He remembers all at once where he is and who he’s with. He peels his eyes open and waits for them to adjust to see the outline of Tom’s back, hunched over on the edge of the bed. His shoulders look enormous in the moonlight. He looks like a statue.

A statue that’s, like, definitely crying.

He waits for a long moment, careful not to move or make any sound of his own -- like a wounded animal, he tells himself. Tom doesn’t sniffle again, but then he hears him shudder and swallow, and the heels of his hands come up to press at his eyes. 

Tentatively, Greg sits up. Tom stiffens, like he can feel that he’s been caught, so Greg doesn’t rush. “Hey,” he whispers. “You okay?”

Tom sniffs, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “You don’t have to whisper, Greg, I’m clearly awake.”

“What’s wrong?” he asks. Tom still hasn’t turned to look at him.

“It’s stupid,” Tom says. “I...I think there’s something wrong with me. I’m just not.” He exhales. Greg tries to reach for his elbow, but Tom blocks him. “Don’t.” Greg backs off.

“I don’t wanna make a thing out of this,” he says, only somewhat softer. “Can you go back to sleep?”

Greg rolls out of bed instead, walking back to the bathroom where they had left the light on earlier. He fills his sink cup with room temperature tap water and carries it back to Tom’s side of the bed.

He doesn’t say anything as he sets the cup on the nightstand, nor when he stands over Tom and uses just one hand to cup his face, running his thumb over his swollen under-eye. Tom’s watery eyes meet his own, and he thinks that he’s glad he already knows that Tom is going to leave him. It’s going to make all of this a lot easier to deal with, when it finally does end.

He pats Tom once lightly, then crosses back around to his own side of the bed. He curls up with his back to Tom, shuts his eyes. He hears Tom sip the tap water, and it makes him feel good.

\---

He hears from Tom three days before he leaves for Christmas.

His phone rings like, three times before he even thinks anything of it. It’s a number he doesn’t recognize, so he just assumes it’s one of those Chinese bots again. But on the fourth call, he starts to get edgy, and he picks up before he can tell himself to ignore it. “Hello?”

“Jesus fuck, answer your phone much?”

“Tom?” He checks his screen. He has Tom’s contact, he knows his number by heart from when he used to organize Tom’s whole life, so why-- “Where are you calling me from?”

“I’m, uh. At a payphone.”

“Wha-- why are you calling me from a payphone? Are you okay? Did something-- what’s--”

“I’m fine, Greg,” Tom nearly snaps. Greg can hear how tense he is. “I just didn’t want…” He sighs.

It’s easy enough to figure out that obviously Tom doesn’t want anyone to know he called. Which shouldn’t hurt his feelings, because obviously it’s best for both of them if no one finds out about this, and yet. “Got it. Anyway. Uh. What’s up?”

Tom is quiet for a long time. Greg’s stomach eats a hole in itself.

Tom takes a deep breath and says, “I really don’t wanna do this...like this. But I just...I didn’t want to just text you, but I knew I couldn’t see you.”

“You can say it,” Greg says.

“I think we have to stop…”

Greg is already nodding. “Okay.”

“...seeing each other. Wait, okay?”

“I mean, what am I gonna say, no? I’m like…” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m, like, kinda pissed you would do this over the phone? Like-- we’re friends, Tom, I thought...”

“I just, I wanted to tell you...that it’s not you...you didn’t do anything--”

“Are you trying to say It’s not you, it’s me right now?”

Tom scoffs, going high-pitched. “Yes, so what if I am!?”

“That’s, like, the least believable line in the book, dude. That just makes it worse.”

“I’m very attached to you,” he says then, firm. Greg feels a catch in his throat. “And I just...I can’t be attached to you. It’s just not going to work.”

“Quit while you’re ahead, man,” Greg says, swallowing. “You’re just twisting the knife now.”

“I don’t want to hurt you! I don’t know how to not--” Tom sighs. Greg can imagine him rubbing his hand down over his face, massaging his own tensed brow. His beautiful forehead, he thinks forlornly, like a freak. “Have a good Christmas,” Tom says, sounding neutral.

“I’ll see you around, Tom,” he says, which isn’t true, and he ends the call.

\---

Normally Greg really relishes the opportunity to take a long drive. It’s such a luxury these days, now that his car mostly sits in a reserved parking spot ninety-nine percent of the time. He finds driving meditative, sort of trance-like and soothing.

Well, now, as Tom would say, “That’s all been shot to hell in Hitler’s fucking handbasket” or something else equally insane.

When he first buckles in, he resolves not to think about Tom. Which pretty quickly becomes only thinking about him once an hour. Maybe twice, if he’s driving through a particularly rural area and doesn’t have much to look at. 

At the halfway point, he stops for gas, and it’s like the universe heard his pleas about forgetting Tom because it sends him the perfect distraction.

But it’s also like the universe has a fucking death wish for him, because the distraction it sends him is a Facebook notification that reads:

You have one message request from Allen Hirsch

He actually laughs, so hard that it kind of hurts right away. “You’re fucking kidding me.” He bends over, hands on his knees. “Yep, that makes sense, actually.” He laughs again. It’s just bubbling out of him and he can’t possibly block it. “Fuck. Wow.” He wipes hysterical tears from his eyes, knows that the other patrons are staring now. “My life is a comedy,” he says aloud. “To somebody. Not to fucking me!”

He pays for the gas inside, and he tells the cashier upfront, “Look, I’m going to give you some advice. Don’t sleep with married men. Because, uh, apparently it’s not actually kosher in just, like, a karmic sense? Sort of morally-spiritually, I guess? Basically the universe will see you doing it and act accordingly.”

The woman just nods and hands him his change before he all but bolts out. “Oh, uh, Merry Christmas,” he tacks on as the door is swinging shut.

The rest of the drive passes in...not a blur, necessarily. He basically blasts his music so loud he can barely think, and then he forces himself to play a joyless game of counting road signs. He loses count every couple hundred, and soon it gets so dark that it ends up being a lot easier to just count the lines on the road. It’s horrible. He hates it. He feels like that boulder guy.

But he makes it to his grandpa’s in one piece, regardless of how much the past few days have felt like getting repeatedly gutted and woodchippered. He’s dead fucking tired, almost stumbling up to the house where he can see his mom waiting in the doorway. She gasps when she sees him coming up the porch. “Oh, Jesus, Gregory, did you drive drunk?”

“Nope, I just look like this right now,” he says, leaning in for a one-armed hug. It’s late enough that his Grandpa is in bed already, and his mom has all the lights off. It’s not un-eerie, but he thinks all houses are a little scary. “Work has been a lot recently.”

“I don’t want to know the dirty details,” Marianne says immediately as she walks him inside and shuts the door behind him.

“Mom, it’s not bad--”

“I just would rather stay out of it.” She had called him after the hearings, and again after the press conference, both times chastising him, but in a passive-aggressive way, for getting involved in such shady dealings.

“You were the one who wanted me to work there…”

“Honey, let’s be real-- I didn’t think you were gonna work your way up so fast.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “Ouch.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” she says, putting a light hand on his back. “Are you sick or something?”

“No. I think I’m just tired.” 

“Okay.” She pats him. “Well, you remember where your old room is.” He nods and smiles. She starts to head up the stairs to her old room. He wonders what it feels like to be 50-something and staying in your childhood bedroom. He thinks it might actually be kind of sweet. Or maybe it’s just sad. It’s probably both, he really doesn’t know anything anymore.

Halfway up the stairs, Marianne stops and looks down on him over the railing. “It’s nice to have you here, honey,” she says, sort of plainly.

“It’s nice to be here,” he says. It’s not like it’s worse than anywhere else.

\---

He wonders if it’s like, a landmark of becoming an adult that holidays are all low-impact and sorta disappointing, or if that just happens to be the trajectory of his life. Actually Christmas is probably still magical for people who have rich dads or, like, all those girls from his high school who got married young. Hallmark people have Hallmark holidays.

It’s not like they’re a family that fights or anything. Both his mom and grandpa are more inclined towards passive-aggressiveness, and that’s honestly pretty easy for him to dance around. They’re mostly pretty quiet, and almost somber. He wonders if they’d make good quakers.

They exchange presents after breakfast, all of them insanely practical: his mom gets him a lumbar support pillow so he doesn’t, quote, “break in half,” and his grandpa makes a donation to some clean water charity in his name. 

And he does a pretty good job of acting grateful and jolly all through the morning, and most of the way through lunch, but it’s as he’s shoveling in mashed potatoes and scrolling through Instagram (and ignoring any other notifications he might have) that he sees Willa’s latest post: the Roys and company, posed around a golden Christmas tree, with the caption All is calm, all is bright [star emoji, shooting star emoji, sparkle emoji].

He zones in on Tom’s face in the crowd instantly, like he has some sort of fucking radar for him. He’s smiling, closed-mouthed and pretty tight-lipped. Not at all like his usual eager, just happy-to-be-included Tom self. And Greg, well, Greg is a moron who goes and immediately makes that mean something. If he gets even the slightest inclination that Tom is unhappy, then his smooth brain is gonna run with it. Tom’s tense smile and eyes that don’t light up could be a marriage proposal for the way they’re making Greg’s palms sweat.

He swipes Instagram away, sets his phone on the table. Takes a long drink of water. Almost immediately picks his phone back up again. His one Facebook Messenger notification taunts him. It’s enough of an excuse to open Instagram again.

He stares at the photo so long, he almost doesn’t know why. It makes him think of Tom and Shiv’s wedding, just a little bit, and how weird it is to watch them all try to pose like a normal family might. Kendall’s absence is expected, yet still strange to see, something not quite right in the space between Shiv and Roman. And then Tom’s hand, curled around Shiv’s shoulder in a way that makes Greg squeamish. But also his fake smile.

“Greg,” his mom sighs, “do you have to be on your phone at the table?”

“It’s work stuff,” he lies, locking his screen almost violently.

“On Christmas Day?” she asks disbelievingly.

“Yes, actually. Corporate espionage doesn’t take a vacation, Mom.”

She rolls her eyes. “Corporate espionage.”

“Leave the man be, Marianne,” Grandpa Ewan says. It’s easily the first time he’s ever called Greg a man. “Let him deal with his affairs.”

“Thank you, Grandfather.” At least being the family traitor is good for one thing.

So he’s glued to his phone like a freaking teenager all day, torturing himself between the Roy family photo and the You have one message request from Allen Hirsch. He feels like he’s watching Marianne out of the corner of his eye all day too, tilting his phone away from her so she doesn’t get a glance and just somehow know what it all means. When he was a kid, it sometimes felt like she could read his mind. At the very least, she always seemed to know when he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing.

It’s what he’s terrified of now, of her inspecting him and seeing him and sussing out that he’s been so greedy. Selfish and needy. A homewrecker. A seductress. 

He’s never had a lot of ambition, it’s true, at least not naturally, but he’s getting older and he’s becoming less okay with the idea of being somebody his mom isn’t proud of. Fucking sue him.

The sun goes down early, and Grandpa Ewan is in bed almost as fast, but his mom stays up with a glass of wine in the living room for basically hours, watching some movie that has, like, a bunch of Italian people in it talking about the moon a lot. Not that it matters, because Greg can only hover in the hallway between the living room and the kitchen, too scared to sit on the couch with his own mother.

He sort of paces around the kitchen for a while, sipping at his own watered-down punch and scanning the refrigerator for leftovers even though the thought of actually eating anything makes him queasy. He perches himself on the counter and stares at his phone. The one red notification icon glares up at him from his messenger app.

What’s the worst it could say? Like realistically, what could Allen Hirsch have to say that’s any worse than, well, his abandonment? Even if it is something bad...there’s this part of Greg that feels like it might not bother him. Or shouldn’t bother him, at least. He shouldn’t care what his absentee dad has to say.

He shouldn’t.

From the living room, Marianne sniffles.

Greg lifts his head, peeking through the doorway. He can only see the back of her head over the couch cushions from here, but he can definitely see that her shoulders are kinda, like, quivering.

He shoves his phone back in his pocket, pushing the message away mentally. Imagining it like a cloud in his mind, and pushing it away. Pushing it away. He tiptoes through the hallway between rooms and comes to stand awkwardly in the doorway of the living room, directly behind Marianne’s head. When she doesn’t immediately notice him, he clears his throat.

His mom startles. “Jesus,” she whispers under her breath. She turns to look at him, sort of expectantly, pretending there aren’t tears in her eyes.

“Are, uh. You okay?”

Marianne rolls her eyes, but also dabs at them discreetly. “It’s just a movie, Greg.”

“Yeah, right.” He twists his hands together in front of him. On screen, the movie-family drinks champagne around a kitchen table. “So it was good? You liked it?”

She blows her nose into a tissue. It’s weird. He doesn’t really see his mom cry, especially not anymore. She’s always been very private in that way. Stay-in-bed days, he remembers. It makes him feel old, in a way, and sort of lonely, but he doesn’t know why. 

“Well, I’ve seen it a bunch of times,” she says, mostly back to normal. “But for some reason, it just gets me every time. I dunno.” 

He nods. She raises an eyebrow, and he watches as her focus sharpens on him. “So what’s your deal?”

“What?” Greg says, like he didn’t even hear her. She doesn’t repeat herself. “Uh, my deal? What do you--”

“Come on, Greg.” She rubs her forehead, like he’s giving her a headache. “You’ve been acting weird since you got here.”

“In what way?” He squares his shoulders and stands up straight, which Tom always says is supposed to make you appear more confident.

Marianne doesn’t react. “You haven’t been talking, you haven’t eaten since lunch, and-- okay, this is sort of unrelated, but...you know your grandfather put you back in his will this year, you could have gotten him something a little nicer than a scarf--”

“He doesn’t like anything! What-- what, do you want me to give him a nice Rolex? He’ll just tell me it has blood diamonds in it.”

“That’s…” She trails off. He smirks. “Whatever. That’s not what this is about.”

She’s almost totally rotated on the couch to look at him now. He half-wants to run and sit next to her, and he’s half-afraid to. She sighs, and he stays put. “Even before you got here...Greg, you barely talk to me. You barely tell me anything about your life. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m… I’m glad that you’re maturing and that you need me less…”

Greg unconsciously takes a step back. “Are you gonna cry again?”

She glares and flips him off to make a real point of it, before easily marching on. “Is something going on?”

He seriously considers pulling out another stock response, but if he stops too long to think, which he does, then that thought cloud is back. The notification on the phone in his pocket. Which makes him think about the photo, which reminds him of the last phone call with Tom, which makes him think about how it’s Christmas, and how he chose being here, anxious in his grandpa’s quiet, empty house, over getting fucked like a milkmaid, and it’s that of all things that makes him want to fucking cry-- and then he’s-- shit.

“Are you crying?”

“No,” he lies.

Marianne stands up, moving around the couch to come closer to him. “Is it something with...the company? Are you in trouble?”

“No,” he wipes his nose with his sleeve. “No, it’s nothing like that.” It’s something way stupider than that, god, he doesn’t even want to say now. “I guess I’m just...reticent to tell you because...because I don’t know how you’ll feel about it.”

“Okay,” his mom says, grabbing him not super gently by the arm and steering him back towards the kitchen. “Come on, I really don’t have all night.”

She pushes him into a chair at the small kitchen table by the window. A moment later, she not-very-gently slams a glass of whiskey in front of him, taking the seat across from him with her own glass.

“Oh, thank you...” He’s really more of a wine guy, to be frank. Tom is too, although he often will bring a six pack over to Greg’s place, like he’s pretending to be the kind of guy who likes beer. Greg hasn’t called him out on it, but he’s keeping it in his back pocket for later.

Or. Was. Was keeping it in his back pocket for later. Now, there’s...well, there’s nothing to do with that information anymore. Just to hold onto it like this, letting it pop up at inconvenient moments, along with all of the other things he just knows about Tom now, and that’s the worst part really, because what’s the point of learning someone so well if they’re just...

Jesus, his eyes are stinging again. He banishes the thought cloud, clears it from his mind. 

“I’m sorry that you never had a father to teach you these things,” she holds her glass up, “but it’s time to start drinking like a man.”

Greg nods, muttering, “Oh, yeah, that sounds...antiquated.” He clinks his glass with hers in a cheers and drinks, and yeah, while drinking liquor straight is definitely for alcoholics and...well, Europeans, probably, he does get the appeal, kind of. The satisfaction of how much it burns on the way down. Like eating something spicy.

He shivers for a second after he swallows, and says, loosely, “I’ve been seeing someone.”

Marianne nods. “Okay.” She sips her drink. “Is that all?”

Greg takes a drink, letting it numb him. “It’s a guy.”

“I-- yes, I don’t...Greg, I’ve always said I don’t care who you bring home--”

“He has a wife.” Greg downs his whiskey in one go.

Marianne clicks her teeth, sucking in air. “Oh, honey…” It’s more condescending than sweet, but condescending is...not bad, all things considered.

“You can say it,” he says despairingly. 

“Say what?” Marianne says. She’s surprisingly...well, she looks pretty disapproving, but it definitely has “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” vibes.

So he’s not so confident when he says, “Say I’m...like my father.” He physically cringes afterwards. Like just speaking the fear aloud is enough to make him realize what a silly, childish thought it is.

His mom nods. “Ah.” She doesn’t say he’s like his father, but she also doesn’t say he’s not like his father either. She just watches him for what feels like an ungodly long time, tapping her nails against the tablecloth. “How did you meet this guy?”

“Um…” She’s being cagey enough that he knows there’s no way he’s in the clear yet, so it’s maybe better that he keeps Tom’s identity...not secret, but vague. “I met him at work. At Waystar.”

“Huh.” She nods. “And I assume his wife doesn’t know about you two?”

“Well, so that’s the thing-- they have an open relationship, but she doesn’t know it’s...me. That he’s been seeing. Not that she would know me,” he says, straightening his spine. “We don’t know each other,” he tacks on.

His mom narrows her eyes. “Is that true?”

He breaks. “No.” He lays his head down on his folded arms on the table, traces over the wood grooves with his thumb. “We know each other. She...also works there. Their marriage is sorta…” He whistles, shaking his head the way he always wants to when he thinks about Tom and Shiv. “And obviously it would be bad if, you know, anything got out about this at work, so we’ve been...keeping it a secret.”

“So when you say you’ve been seeing this guy, you mean you’ve been sleeping with him,” Marianne says bluntly.

He sputters, “I-- it’s-- that’s not the only thing--”

“No, I get it, I do,” she says, like she doesn’t. “It’s very, um. Urban of you.”

He sits back up, head spinning from downing so much whiskey at once. He doesn’t know how to get to the point, to get to the real meat of what’s bothering him, because it’s almost like he can’t quite figure it out himself. He chews on a hangnail, which Tom would think is disgusting. “He’s a difficult person,” he says suddenly. “But I...I get him. And we...” He remembers Tom’s own words. “We have a bond. I think...a lot of people look at him, and they just see him as sort of a joke or like a pawn. And I think that probably...I know that makes him really sad. And afraid. And...desperate, maybe.”

He reaches for the bottle and pours himself another finger. He’s on a roll, might as well keep going. For what it’s worth, his mom sort of smirks. He drinks, and it makes the next words come out wobbly: “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He ended things.”

Marianne is quiet for a long time. “I’m sorry,” she says belatedly. “That sounds really hard.” She sounds like...like a pamphlet for how to be comforting. The hollowness of it just...makes it all worse.

He stands. “Okay, well. Thanks for the drink, it was, uh, very full-bodied--”

“Why didn’t you think you could tell me about that?”

He blinks. “Other than, like, the obvious reason?”

“Did you think I was gonna be mad?”

“I mean…” She looks pissed right now. Why wouldn’t he be at least somewhat concerned about that? “Do you remember...well, when my dad left?”

She scowls. “No, Gregory, I completely forgot.”

He ignores her. “Do you remember...I don’t, like, mean to put you on the spot here, but…” Here goes nothing, really. Now’s as good a time as ever to have this fight. “Okay, I’ll just say that I remember hearing you one time on the phone, I was like eight, and you were talking to one of your friends about Dad…”

“Greg, am I expected to answer for something that happened twenty years ago--”

“Just-- just listen.” He sighs. “It was after he moved out. And he hadn’t moved yet, it was when he was still… Anyway, you said that he, like, wasn’t actually gay, he was just bored and...experimenting.”

Marianne gapes. “I didn’t say that. I would never say that.” 

“I mean-- you sorta did? I don’t think I could have made that up as, like, a child.” 

“Well, that’s…” She shakes her head. “Even if I did say that, I didn’t...I wouldn’t mean it about you.”

“That’s not really…” Ughhhh. He rubs his hands over his face, scrubbing at his tipsy-glassy eyes. “I feel bad because, like, it’s not your fault that that stuck with me, like, you didn’t know I was going to be...right, whatever, but I guess I just...maybe this is stupid. It probably doesn’t even. Need to be said. So--”

“Greg,” Marianne says, measured, slow. “Just say what you mean.”

He takes a deep breath. “I’m saying...I think you were sorta right? Like what if To-- this guy I’m seeing, what if he…” He lets his hands fall down to his sides. “What if he is just bored? And he’s not actually…” He trails off. “Like his marriage is a fucking horror show, so he’s just experimenting with me.”

His mom cocks her head. “Okay, I’m sorry, am I supposed to be saying that you are just like your dad or that this guy you’ve been seeing is just like your dad?”

He blinks. “Uh, well...both, I guess.”

“Right.” She gestures back to the open seat at the table, urging him back to sit. He does, feeling...still anxious, but a little lighter just from saying it all out loud. Or he’s drunk.

“Greg…” Marianne begins. She always says his name like she’s already tired of whatever she’s about to explain to him. “You’re your own person. You’re not your dad. Don’t really know what else I can tell you.”

She takes both of their empty glasses and takes them to the sink. “Now, if you’re worried that this means you have daddy issues...I mean, who doesn’t? Look at me.” She rinses their cups out under the tap. “Look at your fucking cousins.” 

He nods, almost laughing for real. None of this is particularly comforting, but he probably wouldn’t know what to do if his mom suddenly started talking about feelings. It’s almost better to just...have it out there. Not creeping around in his mind so much.

“He sent me a message,” Greg says. “My dad.”

He hears one of the cups slip and clank a little too heavily in the sink. “Oh, really?” She turns, just a bit. “What did he say?”

“I dunno,” he admits. “I haven’t opened it yet.”

“Wha-- so you’re just sitting around, dreading it? Just fucking read it.”

“I dunno, it’s just like...like right now it’s sort of like Schrödinger's message? Like if I never open it, it’s both good and bad--”

“Do whatever you want.” She’s almost out the door. She yawns. “It’s past my bedtime.”

“Okay,” he says. He’s not super surprised, though it is an abrupt end to the conversation. She’s usually pretty cut-and-dry like that, and she’s always in bed before 9:30. “Goodnight.”

“Love you,” she says. 

“Yeah, I-- you too!” He waves, even though she doesn’t turn back to look at him. He almost feels, like, kind of cheered up? Or relieved, mostly. That sort of airiness that comes from having a situation go way less terribly than you expected. It’s enough to have him sprawling on the couch, boneless and just drunk enough, and feeling just gutsy enough to open Allen Hirsch’s one unread message.

Dear Greg, it begins, like a letter. Long time no see. 

Greg laughs a hollow laugh. Like...no shit, Dad. Yeah.

I might be a terrible bastard for this. Would not be the first time, I’m sure you agree. But I saw you testify in that court case a while back, and well...I’m getting sentimental in my old age. It seemed like a sign. I know-- how very queer of me.

Greg laughs a real laugh. This is painfully awkward and surprisingly earnest. He almost wishes it were more, like, shitty? Like a deadbeat dad trying one last ditch effort to absolve his sins. This feels more like a distant gay uncle is getting in touch.

I hope this is a nice thing to hear and not a completely horrible thing to hear, but I do think about you. I do wonder how you’re doing. I don’t expect to make up for a lifetime of failing you, but I’d like to catch up if you do. I’m sure you don’t get up to Providence very often, and I don’t expect to be in the big apple anytime soon, but I’m no luddite. A call or text will suffice. Feel free to use it to tell me to go fuck myself. 

Your father

Greg pores over the message so many times that the words are still imprinted in his mind when he closes his eyes: bastard, queer, Providence, your father… No trace of the words “I’m sorry,” but maybe his dad thinks the message’s running undercurrent of self-loathing is enough. Maybe he’s so sorry that it makes his stomach hurt and he can’t bring himself to say anything, so he just has to send self-deprecating Facebook messages to fight off the guilt that eats away at him.

He must have a lot, right? Twenty years is a long time to sit with a decision like that. It’s also a long time to just wait around for a divine sign that you should finally contact your kid, so. 

He’s anxious to come up with a plan of action, to devise something to say or do, but it’s only getting later and his mind is pretty, like...soupy. Unfocused. Every time he tries to close his eyes and imagine words on a screen, all he can see is Tom, smiling closed-mouthed in a family photo. His dad, making eager eye contact through the rear view mirror, telling Greg he can get whatever he wants from the Burger King drive-in. Tom, his dad, Landon Driscoll calling him a “needy fag.” Tom, laughing. His dad, driving away. His mom saying “sole custody.” Tom crying on the edge of the bed. Himself, kicking against dirt and gravel and finally air, soaring higher with each pump of his legs, gliding above the trees, with nobody watching him at all.

\---

His mom shakes him awake on the couch hours later, her face hovering just inches from his. “Wha--” He startles, knocking his skull on the arm of the sofa. “Wha’s goin’ on--

“There’s someone outside,” she whispers. She’s clutching his arm, nails digging in.

“What? What do you mean?” His vision is blurred still, but he can make out enough to tell she’s holding a baseball bat. He scrambles to sit up.

“This car pulled up about twenty minutes ago and it hasn’t left, look.” She scurries over to the curtains, and he clumsily follows. “The headlights woke me up.”

She slides the curtains aside just enough for him to peek out. Sure as shit, there is a car out there, but it doesn’t look super suspicious? He’s not sure what she’s so freaked out about until…

“Look!” Marianne whispers, somehow still so loud in his ear, and she points. “There’s someone in it.”

He squints-- it’s no later than four in the morning, and the night is still dark, but as his eyes adjust he does begin to see...yeah, like the outline of a person. Through the mostly tinted windows, he can vaguely see a person sitting in their car. Directly in front of their house. Just like, sitting there. It’s sort of chilling, in like an urban legend sort of way. Like if they walked outside to look there would be nobody inside, oooooooh spooky. Dumb and fake.

He shivers anyway.

“I’m gonna call the police--” Marianne says, pulling him by the wrist towards the kitchen.

“I don’t think that’s…” He resists, peering back out the window. “Like, they’re not really doing anything wrong, we can’t just call the cops.”

“Sure we can.”

“I just...it’s not really considered ethical right now? I mean, maybe not as much in Canada--”

“Fine.” She thrusts the baseball bat towards him. “You go out there then,” she says.

“Wh- what?” He doesn’t take the bat. “I don’t-- shouldn’t you go?”

“Why should I go?”

“You’re-- you’re the mom!”

Marianne rolls her eyes, comes close to him. She takes his hand in hers, and then she wraps it around the hilt of the baseball bat. “And you’re a fucking giant. If either of us is going to scare a predator away, it’s not going to be me.”

It is a little freakier than he expects, once he’s out on the front porch in the dead of night, wearing his pajama bottoms and clutching a baseball bat. He supposes this is what it means to be the man of the house. It’s not a role he’s really been expected to play before, but fear must be a great motivator for his mom. He definitely feels that. Especially right now.

Especially as he crunches through the muddy snow, creeping closer to the car with the darkened silhouette inside. “Hey, um...sir? Or madam. It doesn’t really matter, I guess. We are inquiring as to why you have parked your vehicle thus in front of my grandfather’s property--”

The passenger window rolls down just a crack, and impulsively Greg raises the bat in front of his face. “Hey!”

“Jesus, Greg, it’s just me!”

He-- what? Greg bends his knees so he can peer down through the cracked window, where surely there isn’t--

Surely there isn’t Tom sitting inside, but also there totally is. It is Tom. With his eyes bloodshot and his hair oily from hours-old product, wearing a dark green turtleneck sweater. It looks nice on him, Greg will admit. Begrudgingly.

“What the fuck, dude.” He lowers the bat. Blinks a couple of times.

“Can you get in the car?” Tom rolls the window down a little further. He rubs his hands together to warm them, looking apprehensively over Greg’s shoulder.

“Greg,” his mom calls out from the porch. “What’s going on?”

“You can go back to bed, Mom,” he says. “I can handle this.”

“Listen up, you fucking pervert,” she hisses, coming down off her stoop. “If you don’t move your ass off my property, my enormous son will beat the shit--”

Greg waves both hands in front of her. “Mom! Stop.” He can hear Tom almost chuckling behind him, fucking dick. “I know him, this is…” He just looks at her pointedly, eyes wide, hoping it will convey the right meaning of This is the guy I told you about please don’t say anything in front of him.

The brunt of the message must reach its intended target, because Marianne just rolls her eyes and mutters, “Oh, Jesus wept,” before heading back inside. 

He comes back to Tom, who has the gall to look amused. “What do you want?” He tosses the baseball bat into the snow. “Are you mad about something? Are you here to, like…what? You gonna sell me out to Waystar?”

“Jesus, Greg, no! No. Why do you always do that?” He gapes, scoffing repeatedly, like he can’t find his words. He’s so nervous, Greg realizes. “I’m not a monster! I’m not Iago, just waiting in the wings to fucking get you when your back is turned.” He rubs at his forehead, at the angry wrinkles of his haggard face. “Will you get in the car? Please?”

Greg does, because it’s painful either way. To get in the car, to stay outside. To be with Tom, to be without Tom. Might as well, you know?

He looks around the front seat. It’s got that new car sort of smell, but definitely the kind that comes in a spray bottle. The center console is littered with road trip trash. “Did you drive here?”

Tom nods, flexes his hands. “All the way here?” Tom nods again. “Where’d you get the car?” Greg asks, mostly just hoping it’ll get an actual verbal answer out of him.

Tom hums, fake-thoughtfully. “Interesting you should ask! I recently learned that if you have an assistant who is competent, then they will do things for you, such as maintain your appointments or book a rental car service.”

“Fuck off, man.” He’s so not in the mood. Not unless Tom starts talking, and even then. He’s not getting his hopes up that anything Tom has to say will change his mind. But he timidly watches him out of the corner of his eye and waits.

Tom sighs, rubbing his palms over his thighs. Greg’s mouth feels dry. “I needed to see you,” he says, projecting nonchalance.

“What for?” Greg says, crossing his arms. Two can play at that game. He’s pretty much the master of acting casual.

“I don’t know.” Tom shrugs, heavily inspecting his own fingernails. “Suppose I just missed you. What then?”

Greg’s heart beats into his throat, behind his Adam's apple. “You could have called me.” 

“I told you, I needed to see you,” he says, dropping some of the pretense. “I needed you to see that I…” He trails off. Greg leans in unconsciously. That he what? “You know, I left in the middle of Christmas to be here. Everyone saw me leave. Logan, Roman...”

“Oh, yikes. That sounds...yeah.” He can’t really imagine a situation in which either of those people care much about where Tom comes and goes. “Where did you say-- like, what did you tell everybody? When you left?”

First he says, “Nothing,” then, “That I quit.”

“You.” He’s shorting out, no question. His brain feels like goo. “You quit your...job?”

“Yeah,” Tom says, close to hysterical laughing. “Yeah, I suppose I did.”

“Wh--why?” There’s a part of him that still feels so suspicious and completely unable to take any of this at face value. Like he’s about to be Punk’d. You seriously thought your middle-aged fuck buddy was gonna leave his wife for you? That’s so sad. Worst Punk’d reveal ever. Next to that time Zach Braff punched a kid.

“I just don’t think I can do it anymore,” Tom says, staring at the steering wheel, so clearly. “I really thought I could take...being the family punching bag, you know? If I meant that I had Shiv…” 

It’s easy to see the sorrow that still lingers there for him, even months after their marriage changed for good. The depth of love that he felt, and probably still feels, for Shiv-- Greg gets it. He’s aware of it. He understood the undertaking of being with Tom, who has cultivated an entire personality around worshipping and supporting Shiv. Their whole dynamic is unhealthy and cringey now, but...he has to imagine they were really happy at one point.

And he remembers once when he really was just happy to see that Tom was happy. The confusing burgeoning attraction to him was...there, but it wasn’t constant. It was a meaningless sort of crush, easy enough to push away for the sake of family. For the sake of his friend. 

Tom is looking out the windshield, very far away. He’s shaking his head. “But she was there tonight, and I was with her. And she looked beautiful, like always, and then the family was awful, like always, and--” He clenches his fists on top of his thighs. “And all I could think about the whole time was you.”

Greg’s breath shudders out of him, fucking humiliatingly loud, and he physically cover his mouth with his fingers. 

“And then the conversation turned, as it always fucking does, and they were...basically discussing their plan of action towards Kendall.” He finally turns to actually look at Greg, with a wry sort of expression. “And I was already thinking about you, so then I was thinking about...the yacht again.”

Greg nods. “Hmm, right. Because you wished we were, like, fucking in a closet somewhere?”

“Well, that’s a given,” Tom says, dry. “But I meant more...I thought about ‘Greg sprinkles.’ Fucking ‘Tom sundae with a Greg cherry on top.’ Fucking-- you getting on a helicopter the next morning to basically supervise Kendall while he forcibly commit suicide on live TV, it was...obscene, right? Just an absurd…”

“Boar on the floor,” Greg says absently.

“Yes! Exactly. Fucking boar on the floor. It just…” He frowns. “It doesn’t sit well anymore.”

Tom laughs then -- major mood whiplash with this guy. “It was wild, you know, but I just had this feeling...that I wanted to be here! At your grandpa’s weird...scary old house.”

“Huh,” Greg says, close to smiling. 

He half-mutters the rest of the story, “I texted my assistant for a rental car, and I texted Kendall to ask where the fuck you were.”

“You did?” Maybe it’s kinda stalker-y, but Greg smiles in spite of himself. Tom left a text trail with Kendall just to figure out where he was. “Wait, how does Kendall have my location?”

“Apparently you added him on the Find My Friends thing so you could…babysit him? Make sure he doesn’t go all Kurt Cobain?”

Oh, yeah he did do that. He should honestly probably check it more often than he does.

“Here’s the deal,” Tom says, earnestly turned to face him now. “I’m a fucking idiot. If I’m off base with any of this, fucking-- just tell me to leave, I will. I get it.”

Greg nods, dry swallowing. 

“Would it mean anything to you if I said I was leaving Shiv? Like actually.”

He feels eager suddenly, jittery and hot. He nods, “Yeah, um. That would...mean a lot to me, actually?”

“In a good way?” God, he’s so fucking insecure. It’s so...god. Fucking Tom.

“Yeah, in a good way.”

“And you…” He dares to venture out with one hand, resting it lightly on Greg’s forearm. “You would want to be with me? In a more...legitimate capacity?”

Greg is, like, blazingly horny for him right now. Part of him wants to roast Tom for being unable to just ask a guy out normally using normal words, and part of him wants to cry and tell him he fucking loves him, but mostly he just wants to climb over the center console and put his mouth on Tom’s mouth, so that’s exactly what he does.

Tom muffles an, “oh, okay,” into the shared space between their mouths as Greg goes kinda insane with lips and teeth and tongue. He’s like, definitely never care so much about suckling and biting at someone’s lower lip before. It’s a lot, and he feels sorta needy, but-- whatever. He is needy. Tom’s never ashamed to seem needy, and he doesn’t seem overwhelmed by it now. He seems fucking hot, is what he seems like, and weirdly earnest with his hands on Greg’s face, stroking sweetly over his cheekbones, his earlobes, his neck.

Tom pulls away enough to duck down and kiss his jaw. “I do still think we should maybe...talk about this--”

“I know, dude, I know, but can we not just--” Greg lifts Tom’s head up to look in his eyes, lust-blown and so red and so...ugh, god. “Can we just talk about everything tomorrow? And tonight we can just…” He swallows. “...go inside and you can do whatever you want to me?”

“Deal,” Tom says easily. “Fuck.” He grabs at the back of his head roughly, pulling him down for a bruising kiss before palming, just once, at his cock, which is so obvious and so stiff through his pajama pants. He groans as Tom shoves him away and back towards the passenger side. “Go, before you cream all over the leather upholstery.”

Greg obeys, reaching for the handle on the passenger door. “Wait…” Tom pauses Greg with a hand on his wrist. “Your family…do they know that you’re…you know.” Greg shakes his head, not comprehending. Tom waves his hand around vaguely. “You know…”

“Like...you mean, like, sexually active, or…”

“Wha-- no, I don’t mean sexually active.” He sighs. “Gay, Greg. I mean gay.”

“Oh,” Greg says. “Well, I mean, I think so? I mean, I never came out to them or anything, but I think they could just tell.”

“How?”

“Uh, because I was only having sex with guys.”

Tom laughs, slapping him on the thigh in a way that feels distinctly flirtatious and un-heterosexual of him. “Race you upstairs,” he says before bolting out of the car.

Greg darts out close behind — “Loser has to swallow his own load!”

\---

It’s easy enough to tiptoe up the stairs and through the halls, giggling and shushing each other like teenagers trying not to get caught. It’s one thing to neck in the darkness of the night in a parked car. It’s another entirely to be sitting side by side on Greg’s childhood bed, achingly turned on but suddenly clammy-handed and unsure.

“You know,” Greg says suddenly, like he’s had a great idea. “It’s so late, and you’ve been driving for so long. Maybe we should just call it a night?”

Tom nods. “Sure, yeah. No, good thinking.”

“Okay,” he says, every part of him screaming wait, no— “I’m gonna just head to the bathroom, then.”

“No, yeah, I really…” Tom stands, patting his pockets down. “...should go back to the car and get my go-bag.”

“What do you have a go-bag for?” Greg asks. “Like for...tropical storms?”

“No, Greg,” he says, deadpan. “For leaving my wife.”

He’s out the door a second later, but Greg lingers in the doorway for much longer, taking it in. It’s gripping to think that Tom passionately decided to leave his wife in the throes of Christmas dinner, but it’s almost more stabilizing to know that he had been planning it. That maybe he won’t regret it so bad tomorrow.

He still spends too much time in the bathroom looking at himself in the mirror, just staring for no reason and wondering if, when he looks back to his room, Tom will still be there.

But he is, of course, and Greg feels shitty for doubting him. He stands in the hallway, just looking through the doorway at him. He’s changed into matching top-bottom pajamas and is lounging on his back in the middle of Greg’s bed, scrolling through his phone nonchalantly. It takes him a second to realize Tom is wearing thin little reading glasses. He looks stupid and cute and comfortable, and Greg feels entranced as he glides back to the foot of the bed, raising one knee up and then the other. Tom puts his phone to the side.

“I changed my mind about what I said earlier, that was a dumb idea,” he says, crawling on his knees over Tom.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Tom says, welcoming him on top with his arms around Greg’s shoulders, his hips against Greg’s hips, his mouth on Greg’s earlobe, tugging. 

Greg moans at the friction, the heat. He shoves his hands underneath Tom’s dumb striped shirt to stroke his ribs and his hips and the coarse hair around his belly button. “You should fuck me,” he says. “Don’tcha think?”

“Guh,” Tom says. 

“I missed you, too, just by the way,” he says as he slips his fingers under Tom’s waistband, just sorta teasing there for a while. “I thought I was gonna be fine, you know, not good but just fine, but then I came here and…”

“Yeah.” Tom is nodding insistently, tugging at Greg’s shirt. “Yes.”

“...I guess I couldn’t stop thinking about you either.” 

“God, Greg, yes,” he says again. He gets Greg’s shirt up and over his head and shoves his pajama pants down his hips, past his offensively hard cock, and then he grabs Greg by the shoulders and fully flips him onto his back. 

Greg breathes heavily through kiss-swollen lips, staring up at Tom, flexing his wrists under Tom’s fingers. “You’re totally going to fuck me, aren’t you.”

“Aren’t you an eager fucking beaver,” Tom says, finally stripping Greg’s bottoms all the way off. “Do you spread this easily for all the boys?”

“It’s just you, dude,” he says, plain and true. “You’ve made me, like, a deviant.” It’s honestly kind of mortifying to be this easily aroused. It’s like he’s having a second puberty. He moans when Tom shoves his knees up towards his chest and basically melts into the mattress as Tom strokes two dry fingers, soft and slow, over his hole.

“Quit dicking around, man.” He shoves Tom up and off, directs him on where to find the lube in his duffle bag, dodges Tom’s barbs about bringing lube to stay at his grandpa’s house, and then clutches wantonly at the bedframe while Tom slides two slicked, warm fingers inside of him.

It’s too fast from there, too easy to tell Tom he’s ready already and fumble open a condom packet, easy enough to hold his own knees up so Tom can brace himself on the mattress as he pushes inside, so slow and too soon, and he can’t control that he’s pathetically begging, “More, come on, please--”

Tom doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, and he’s not compelled by Greg’s whining. He moves slowly, uncertainly at first, fucking him in short strokes that don’t really do much other than tease, but Greg can feel and see in Tom’s face -- the moment he settles in and the teasing becomes a conscious and calculated game. Tom is imposing like this, towering over him where he’s spread open and basically at Tom’s mercy, and he swallows. “What do you want?” Tom asks, stalling his thrusts entirely.

Greg groans. “I already told you, like, at the beginning of the conversation--”

“Oh, right,” Tom says, before rolling into one sharp thrust that has Greg moaning and arching into the pillows. “You wanted me to fuck you, didn’t you?” Greg just nods, resigned. It’s true, at least. “Well, I’m going to.” He thrusts again, sinking in deeper, grinding their hips together, Greg is going to fucking murder-- “Do you know why?”

“Because I’m a slut and I deserve it?” Greg says, just hazarding a guess.

Tom shakes his head, brings his hand to tangle in Greg’s hair. “Because you’re my guy,” he says, smoothing his hand-- so big, so warm-- over Greg’s hair and down the side of his face. “I got you,” he says, curling his hand just teasingly around Greg’s throat. “I want you,” he whispers, and Greg, who’s a fucking moron, comes immediately between them, gasps and shudders through it while Tom rubs his palms over his chest and shoulders. 

Tom does laugh at him for losing it, asks, “First time, bro?” but he also kisses the side of his face before turning him on his stomach and doing whatever he fucking wants to him, until soon he’s pulling out and coming all over Greg’s back. That part would be even hotter if his brain wasn’t basically goo leaking out of his ears. 

Greg almost passes out there on his stomach, covered in jizz and bonelessly sated, praying that his mom doesn’t come to investigate, until Tom forcibly pulls him up and wipes him down with a travel pack of wet wipes. 

“You’re like a Boy Scout,” he mumbles. He hooks one finger in the collar of Tom’s shirt, just to touch some part of him, and Tom smiles, unguarded and real. 

“Go to sleep, 30-Year-Old Virgin,” he says, shoving Greg onto his back. He watches sleepily as Tom walks half-naked to the hall bathroom and turns to nuzzle his face in the sheets. He’s barely lucid enough to register Tom sliding into bed beside him minutes later, curling a hand around his forearm and nestling their legs together, but he leans into it anyway. It if feels right, why question it?

\---

The next morning, which is really only a few hours later, Greg pulls Tom out the front door with him before anyone else is awake, winding two thick scarves around both of their necks. Tom starts bitching about the cold pretty much from the moment his foot touches what’s left of the melting snow, and Greg almost feels for him. Tom doesn’t even really own a winter coat. One of the perks of being a somebody in New York City is that you get driven everywhere -- Tom hasn’t felt more than a few seconds of winter air since he met Shiv. 

The streets are empty enough that he wouldn’t be too nervous to wrap an arm around Tom, probably still under the guise of huddling for warmth, but he feels nervous for some other reason. Tom is quiet in a way that’s kinda unsettling. Tom said he wanted to talk today. 

He steers them towards a playground outside of an old church. He wishes for the sake of, like, poetry or whatever that he had some childhood memories at this particular playground, but he doesn’t. They’re not Episcopalian, so. It’s just a playground.

Greg holds the gate open for Tom then beelines towards the swingset, letting Tom fall behind a few steps. “Seriously?”

“You always gotta take advantage of an empty swingset,” he says, using the sleeves of his coat to wipe slush off the seats. “There’s usually, like, a line for these.”

Tom rolls his eyes as Greg settles on the middle swing. “You’re gonna break that thing,” he says.

“Nah, I don’t think so.” 

He kicks against the ground lightly, not enough to actually get him in the air, just enough to sorta glide back and forth. Tom eyes the swingset next to him like it’s a biohazard, but ultimately just sighs and lowers himself to sit on it. He definitely doesn’t swing.

They’re both quiet for another long minute or two, with the exception of Tom’s teeth chattering. The swing creaks, kind of mockingly, like it’s seriously considering snapping and proving Tom right. But the old chain hangs on.

“I just don’t understand why you don’t hate me,” Tom says, then clamps his mouth shut like he wishes he hadn’t. 

“Huh? Why would I--” He pauses, searches Tom’s face. Tom won’t look at him. “Like, why would you even...say that, like, what makes you say that?”

“Because I’d fuckin’ hate me if I were you,” he says. He loosely gathers a handful of snow at his side and flings it in the direction of the monkey bars. “I treated you like my mistress. Like a low-end hooker.” He kicks up a clump of ice and mud. “Woulda been one thing if you’d have let me Pretty Woman you,” he says, sounding so put out that it makes Greg smile.

“I told you, man, I’m not mad about that.” He pushes himself back with his feet and releases, swings forward once, twice, three times. “You didn’t make any promises to me, so it’s not really a big deal.”

Tom presses his hands into his eye sockets, dragging them down with a groan. “This is the fucking problem, Greg!” He stands, curling his hands into fists. “It should be a big deal! You should care that I hide you, and that I ignored you, that I have to cancel plans with you because I have a wife, Greg, I--” He groans. “I told Shiv that I was fucking someone else two months ago, she barely even blinked. Not a blip on her radar. She doesn’t care! And you, you always say oh, it’s not a big deal. So go-with-the-flow. How unorthodox and mature of you, you pusillanimous people pleaser--”

He sighs in frustration, struggling to follow Tom’s manic ramblings. He remembers talking to his mom last night and says, “Tom, just say what you mean.”

Tom drops his arms limply at his sides and says, his face as open as Greg’s ever seen it, “If you wanted me, then it would have mattered. You would have been sadder when I was with Shiv. You would have been angrier when I was ignoring you, or...I don’t know, needier when I came back.” He shakes his head and comes to sit back on the swing. Greg is deathly still, watching him. “But you never said anything. I always just took it to mean that you didn’t care. At least not as much as...” He trails off, physically puts his hand over his mouth.

Greg shakes his head, reaching across the gap between swings to rest his hand on Tom’s shoulder. “Dude, you think I didn’t care?” He laughs, disbelieving. “I care, like, an unreasonable amount.”

“Yeah?” Tom looks at him finally, guarded but hopeful.

“Yeah.” He digs his fingers into the meat of Tom’s shoulder, kneads at the muscle. “Honestly, I was kinda freaked out that you could tell. How much I cared.”

“Why wouldn’t you want me to know?”

He pulls his hand off Tom’s shoulder and rubs his own forearms. He’s shivering, but not because of the cold. “I guess I misread the situation?” It’s hard to talk about this when neither of them will really say what the situation is — he’s still half- waiting for Tom to explain that he cares but not in that way. “Like you said, like Pretty Woman? Like no feelings, no kissing?”

“We never had a no kissing rule,” Tom says, voice so low and gruff that it makes Greg’s stomach kinda hurt, in a good way. “But you never complained,” Tom continues, un-sexily. “You would have just said nothing and been my...side piece forever?”

Greg rubs his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. “Except I didn’t think it was gonna last forever? I thought you would...I dunno. Get bored? Leave?”

When Tom doesn’t immediately respond, he opens his eyes again. A pang goes through his chest at the hurt he sees plainly on Tom’s pale face. “You think that about me?” Tom asks. It’s not an accusation, but it’s the guiltiest Greg’s felt.

“I don’t think that about you, I just...think that.” He looks out at the sun-faded plastic of the playground set. Thinks about being small enough to sit under the spiral slide. About swinging so high he could go all the way around. “I’m Greg the egg, you know? I’m like ‘Frankenstein if the mad scientist forget to add self-respect.’” That’s a direct quote, a Roman Roy original. Easy to brush off because, like, even Greg knows that Frankenstein is the mad scientist. But still.

Greg rubs the back of his neck. “I would think that almost anybody would...get bored of me.”

He’s barely finished his sentence before Tom is kissing him, hard, standing over him and tangling his hands with Greg’s around the chains of the swing. It’s an unforgiving kiss, one that’s more pressure and heat than any actual, like, movement of their lips, but it feels sort of like Tom is just proving that they fit together like this. That it can feel so right to be kissing Tom on an Episcopalian swingset in a Canadian playground. 

Tom’s hands come up to grasp his head, as forceful as his mouth, before he pulls away to nuzzle into Greg’s ear basically. “I am not bored,” he says while mashing his lips against various parts of Greg’s face and neck. “Consider me the opposite of bored. Consider me compelled. Engrossed, even.”

“Okay—okay!” He’s ticklish under his chin where Tom apparently thinks his tongue is supposed to be. He shoves him off, laughing. “I get it, I do.”

He smooths his hand over the lapel of Tom’s stupid, expensive coat. He shrugs, hoping really hard he comes across as coy when he says, “I suppose I’m engrossed...about you, too.”

Tom rolls his eyes. “Yeah, well, why didn’t you ever just say that?”

“You’re asking why I didn’t say anything?” The nerve of this fucking guy. The way Greg is so gonna reward him for his terrible behavior. “Dude, I made you blow your load one time, and then a week later you told me you were going to stay married to your wife but still wanted to fuck me. I don’t have, like...a reference point for what that’s supposed to mean.”

“It means...” Tom hauls him up by the armpits, and Greg steadies his hands on Tom’s shoulders, which is probably exactly what Tom wanted, “...take a goddamn hint and take me home.”

Greg smiles. “Fine.”

Tom spins Greg around by his shoulders and shoves him towards the gate. Tom skids a little on the ice on the sidewalk, and Greg flings an arm around his shoulders to steady him. Then decides to just keep it there.

“Can we make out in your car again?”

“Can we-- are you serious, it’s like seven-thirty. No. We’re going to get back in bed and...make out there.”

Greg sighs, purposely leaning more of his body weight into Tom. “It just feels like a waste of a nice rental, that’s all.” His hand drifts up to swirl around the short hairs at the back of Tom’s neck, just like he knows Tom likes. “I think those seats are heated.”

“No,” Tom says with his mouth, although his face is clearly saying that he totally wants to do it now. He just doesn’t want Greg to have the satisfaction of knowing that he wants to do it. 

It does give him plenty of satisfaction -- double entendre intended -- when Tom immediately tugs him towards the driveway and into the backseat, but he doesn’t rub it in. It’s just nice to be here, getting fondled in a car just for shits and giggles by somebody who is engrossed in him. 

\---

They both slip back inside a while later, flushed and flustered, joints stiff from squeezing their six-plus-foot selves into a mid-sized sedan, and Marianne is waiting in her robe on the couch. If she had a lamp to click on, she totally would. It doesn’t feel any less like being trapped into an interrogation.

“Hi,” she says to Tom, very pointedly. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.” He’s almost whispering. “Mrs. Hirsch,” he adds on, like a teenager who just brought Greg home past his curfew.

“Greg doesn’t bring a lot of suitors home,” she says, clearly enjoying this, “so I’ll apologize if I was a little prickly when you arrived.”

Tom smiles defensively, shaking his head. “No, no, you were...well within your rights.” Tom brushes his fingers against Greg’s lower back and excuses himself, mumbling something about brushing his teeth, and Greg is left alone to scowl at his mom. 

“Don’t rile him up, please. He’s very fragile right now.”

Marianne beckons him closer with one finger. “Why does your gentleman caller look so familiar to me?” she asks. It’s...accusing. Like she just knows there’s a real reason. It’s why he doesn’t even bother coming up with a lie.

“Okay, so…” He sits next to her on the couch, leaning forward with his arms braced on his knees. “You remember how I said he was married?”

His mom nods, with a what the fuck did you do sort of expression.

He winces, anticipating-- “And do you remember your cousin Siobhan?”

Marianne closes her eyes, sighing and bowing her head. “Greg.”

“I know,” Greg whines.

She sighs again, before opening her eyes and slapping a hand on his back, almost warmly. “Well. Your grandpa’s going to love that.” 

They do manage to avoid any further confrontations with Marianne, only by insisting it’s too long of a story and they really should hit the road. She contents herself with eyeing the two of them obsessively and threatening Greg with a phone call in the coming days. Grandpa Ewan seems more interested in not acknowledging Tom’s presence there at all, which kinda works out better for all of them.

He follows Tom to the rental car return place so they can finish the drive into the city together, and he waits in the parking lot while Tom returns the car (and no doubt argues about something pointless with some poor manager). 

Now that he’s alone for the first time since the whole whirlwind of Tom showing up on his proverbial doorstep in the middle of the night, fucking him, and then confessing, if not his love, at least his desire for something more monogamous, it’s sort of all catching up to him. Like he’s spent the past three days breathing at a higher altitude, and now he’s back down at, like, earth level and has just...super breathing. Yeah. Like that.

He wonders if there’s a bubble that’s going to burst when they’re back in New York. Probably, because like-- the passion of a Christmas grand gesture doesn’t last forever, most likely. There’s a lot of real shit to work out now, like jobs and wives and fucking takeovers, and it’s going to be hard to trust that this thing with Tom is real. Partially because of who Tom is, or how he’s been in the past, but also because of who Greg is. 

And it’s that part that has him staring at his phone again, at the message from his dad that’s marked as Received but has no reply. And he’s still staring when Tom comes back to the car, shaking his head and bristling as he climbs into the passenger seat.

“Fucking imbeciles. I had that car for twenty-one hours, how the fuck does that come out to me paying for two days?”

“Hmm, yeah, I dunno,” Greg says absently.

“I charged it to the company card, but still. The principle.” He warms his hands by blowing into them, side-eyeing Greg. “What’s your deal?”

“Huh?” Tom gestures to the phone. “Okay, uh.” He clicks the phone to black, dropping it in the center cupholder. “So you know my absentee gay dad?”

Tom blinks, opening his mouth but saying nothing for a long moment. “I do now,” he says finally.

“Yeah, well, I never talk about him.” He picks at the upholstery. Not leather like Tom’s fancy rental. “He left when I was a kid, and I don’t even think that much about him,” he lies. “But he sent me a message the other day.”

“What for?”

Greg shrugs. “I dunno, just to catch up, I guess.”

“Not to...what, make up for his decades of neglect?” He really kind of loves this Tom that’s, like, righteously angry on his behalf, even if he’s kind of embarrassed that it’s become such a thing.

“Not in so many words, no,” he says.

“Fuck him,” Tom says agressively. “Seriously, tell him to...take his own dick and shove it up his asshole, see how much he likes it then.”

“Okay...look, when you say homophobically, like, charged things, it sends sort of mixed messages--”

“I know, I’ll work on it!” He deflates. “What...what do you need?” he asks sort of stiffly. “Do you want me to say ‘Fuck that guy’, or do you want…what do you want to do?” 

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I’ve spent basically my whole life avoiding talking to him, I just…” He’s been pretty caught up in figuring out what he should do, not what he wants to do. “I guess I’m supposed to like, forgive him, probably, but that just…pisses me off. But I don’t wanna...Like, I don’t wanna not see him?” 

“Okay, that’s...well, that’s something.” Tom nods, then ostensibly feels confident enough to rub his hand along Greg’s arm comfortingly. Greg pats his hand back. He thinks they must look like two aliens trying to learn how humans express their feelings.

“Maybe I could learn stuff from him,” he says, finally. “Or like...maybe it would just be nice for him to see...that I’m good. That I turned out, like, fine.” He shrugs again. He doesn’t know if any of that is true or valid, but it’s reassuring to have Tom smiling at him, bright-eyed, his thumb caressing the weird little skin wrinkles of Greg’s inner elbow.

“Trade me,” Tom says then, unbuckling the seatbelt he just buckled. “You text, I’ll drive.”

“Oh. I mean, it can wait until later, and I don’t even...like, I don’t even know what I’m gonna say--”

Tom is already standing at the driver’s side door. “You have twelve hours to figure it out.” He waves Greg out, slapping his ass casually as he does. “I kinda like driving anyway. Didn’t realize how much I’d missed it.”

Greg smiles. “Yeah, totally.” He buckles himself in while Tom reverses precariously out of the parking lot, then peels out onto the main road, tires squealing. Huh, so...that’s gonna be the deal for the next twelve hours. At least he won’t be bored.

“Can’t wait to be home,” Tom mutters, almost to no one at all, and without looking he reaches his hand out over the center console, palm up and fingers curled gently. Greg takes a deep breath, and he coils their fingers together, and with his other hand propped against the window, he starts to type.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm tired of daddy issues. 2021 is about projecting my mom onto greg's mom
> 
> you can follow me on tumblr @daddysnumberonecandybaby, we can talk about tomgreg going homphobically canon


End file.
